1 


SUNDAY 

TALKS 

TO 

TEACHERS 


HELEN 
WODEHOUSE 




BookXi T \ ■ ( *- 
GopigtaNL 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSfT. 



SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
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MACMILLAN & CO.. Limited 

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



SUNDAY TALKS TO 
TEACHERS 



BY 

HELEN WODEHOUSE, D.Phil. 



39eto gorfc 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1921 

All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 




Copyright, 1921 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and printed. Published October 1921 



SEP 2c 1921= 



FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY 
NEW YORK 



£)CLA624550 



*-. . - 





CONTENTS 




CHAP. 




page 


I. 


Guides and Light-Bringers 


7 


II. 


The Yoke 


22 


III. 


The Good Day .... 


33 


IV. 


God the Prisoner 


41 


V. 


Opportunities .... 


53 


VI. 


Childishness ... 


67 


VII. 


Powers of Darkness 


80 


VIII. 


Witnesses ..... 


91 


IX. 


The Strength of the Lord 


97 


X. 


The Desire for Experience 


. 112 



SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 



GUIDES AND LIGHT-BRINGERS 

I WILL introduce my subject by reminding you of 
part of a poem by A. E. Housman: 

"Look left, look right, the hills are bright, 
The vales are light between, 
Because 'tis fifty years to-night 
That God has saved the Queen. 

Now, while the flame they watch not towers 
About the land they trod, 
' Lads, we'll remember friends of ours 
Who shared the work with God." 

It is this last thought that I need; the thought 
of a divine work shared by human beings. The 
s'oldiers share with God the work of defence ; the 
farmers that of "causing the grass to grow for the 
cattle, and herb for the service of man" ; the crea- 
tive workers, from the artisan to the artist and 
poet, share the primal work of making the world. 
What is there for the teachers ? 

I think we can find a description, beautiful 
enough, of the work in which our share is ap- 

7 



8 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

pointed. I take it from the first chapter of St. 
Luke: "To give light to them that sit in dark- 
ness . . . and to guide . . . into the way of 
peace" 

I 

Even from a child's point of view, this is a 
fair description of the work of a good school. 
One small picture it brings to my mind is that of 
arithmetic lessons in the Upper Fourth when I 
was thirteen years old. I had studied decimals 
before I went to school, and had found it like 
groping among hard sharp objects in a dark room. 
The school course now threw into these dark 
places such a flood of light that I moved securely 
in a transformed world. I did not use those 
words, but for years afterwards I cared chiefly 
for that quality in a teacher, — the power of 
making things "clear." Since then I have come 
to value other kinds of light also: that which 
comes, for instance, from the wide knowledge or 
the keen imagination of the teacher or the writer, 
or from his power of inspiration. But the precious 
book or speech presents itself to me still in the 
same way, as new light; as making me see some- 
thing that I had not seen. 

The other reference, to the u way of peace," 
did not suggest itself to me in my school days. 
At first I was bewildered by all the new expe- 



GUIDES AND LIGHT-BRINGERS V 

riences, and afterwards it was the amount and 
vigour of life that impressed me rather than its 
peacefulness. But, looking back, I see myself 
guided into greater peace of a very real kind, — 
childish morbidities swept away, room made for 
the free growth of any powers I had, instincts 
flourishing in a keener air than that of the home 
school-room. Mine was a big town day-school, 
with no games or playground, and with scarcely 
any social life, and its range of subjects was nar- 
row, though the chief of them were taught very 
well. A modern school with its wider activities 
would do still more for most of its children. 

When a teacher of infants helps a little child 
to learn the use of its unknown powers and the 
management of its bewildering impulses, — leading 
it towards self-mastery, co-ordinating into a wider 
and richer life the forces that pull it hither and 
thither, releasing it from the bondage and the 
storms of babyhood, and preparing it to deal vic- 
toriously with new difficulties as they come, — she 
is most surely working as a guide towards peace. 
And, at the other end, we are to do this work not 
only for the individual but for the nation. How 
can the great and hard business of the Common- 
wealth be carried on if its citizens are uneducated 
and untrained? or how can the national life be 
rich where minds are narrow and impulses are 



10 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

merely tumultuous or merely starved? Consider 
all the intricate headwork which must be done, and 
the wise and patient public opinion which must 
come into being, if the nations are to find the 
way even of outward international peace. If we 
have part of the task of preparation for this, we 
could hardly choose higher work to share with 
God. 

Perhaps it would not be too fanciful to dis- 
tinguish the two sides in the text. One teacher 
is interested chiefly in the bringing of light; he is 
not only a teacher but a lifelong student of truth, 
and his work will expand along the lines of schol- 
arship. Another will care chiefly for the work of 
guidance, — not the scholar's side of teaching but 
the pastoral side. He will carry it further along 
the lines of social work, with growing skill in 
dealing with human beings and growing care for 
humanity. There is no need to say, and no pos- 
sibility of saying, that one of these types is better 
than the other. Each will be specially fitted for 
certain special posts, and both are imperatively 
needed by the nation. 

II 

This, then, is our incredibly high calling. How 
far do we fall short! I need not describe the 
obstacles that we all share — weakness of flesh, 



GUIDES AND LIGHT-BRINGERS 11 

dulness of spirit, conflicting duties. Nor need I 
say much now of the conditions which have to be 
satisfied, except for one thing which I fear I must 
have reiterated with you to the point of weariness, 
which yet I would repeat once more. The essen- 
tial condition seems to me always to be this — that 
we should keep alive ourselves. 

If we are to continue to teach we must some- 
how continue to grow. In one way or another 
we must go on breaking new ground: in scholar- 
ship, in knowledge of the world and sympathy 
with it, in friendliness and helpfulness towards 
human beings, in acquaintance with God. Not 
all these ways are necessary for all (except in some 
sense the last), but every real teacher must use 
one or two, and must go on using them. When 
we begin our professional lives we may be care- 
less through thinking that there is plenty of time 
ahead; but very soon for most people the obstacle 
arises from the opposite thought, that there is 
no time left. At some age far short of thirty we 
find ourselves saying that it is too late to arrange 
for growing now; that our formative time is fin- 
ished; that now we must go on as we are and live 
on our capital to the end. I was reckoning the 
other day that it would be twenty years this sum- 
mer since I left school. I reflected on all that had 
happened to me since then, and on the different 



12 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

person that I had become; and I was assuming, 
as one usually does, that the small remainder of 
my life would be lived by the person who now 
was myself; that no change or growth worth 
speaking of would happen in future. And then 
it struck me that, though I have twenty years of 
grown-up life behind me, in all probability I have 
a good deal more than twenty years of work ahead 
of me; that the time for growth and change in 
front was actually more than the time that had 
passed. So with that reflection it seemed well 
worth while to begin to learn a new subject. 

Sometimes we say to ourselves, "I need not 
learn any more because I know quite enough for 
the purpose of teaching." Sometimes, on the 
other hand, we say, "My time and strength are 
so small that it is no use to try. I could never 
learn enough to make any difference." On the 
side of character we have a better philosophy. 
We do not say, "My morals, or my religion, or 
my general civilisation, are far enough already in 
advance of my pupils"; nor do we say, "it is no 
use to try, because I could never improve enough 
to make any difference." On this side we see at 
once that these statements are so irrelevant as 
to be almost blasphemous. But they are equally 
irrelevant on the intellectual side. Whether for 
intellect or for character, the essential question is 



GUIDES AND LIGHT-BRINGERS 13 

never "How far advanced are you?" nor yet 
"How far can you advance in a year?" but always, 
"Which way is your face turned?" An earthly 
authority appointing a teacher has to ask, "What 
have you learnt?" and "What have you done?" 
but the divine authority asks, "What are you do- 
ing now?" It asks not, "How many works of 
merit have you accumulated under the Law?" but 
"Are you now living in the Spirit?" "In character 
or in mind, is your will turned to go forward?" 
"Are you now alive?" 

"To give light to them that sit in darkness." 
If our faces now are not turned towards the light 
of life, we ourselves are in the extreme darkness, 
the "shadow of death." It is a barren and limited 
work, and an arrogant claim, for one to enlighten 
others who is in that shadow himself. But, how- 
ever low and however weak we are, to escape from 
that shadow we have only to turn round. 

Ill 

Are we arrogant anyhow when we take that 
text to ourselves? Are we justifying the popular 
complaint of the conceit and self-sufficiency of 
teachers? The accusation should be far from the 
truth if we are working rightly, for any truth 
that it has depends on our being dead. So far as 
we are alive, in touch ourselves with the Light and 



14 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

with the Way, there will be no danger of our lack- 
ing humility. 

In the first place, we shall become humble 
through our personal touch with the things of 
which we are the servants. So long as we go 
on learning we shall not be conceited about what 
we have learnt. Only when we cease to learn, 
and our acquired knowledge turns set and stiff, 
can we make of it a pedestal to stand on. The 
typical scholar is not an arrogant person. I have 
seen somewhere a story of a great mathematical 
teacher and discoverer, whose name was given to 
a theorem which he was the first to work out. 
When in his teaching he came to that point, he 
said, "And now we come to the theorem whose 
name I have the honour to bear." The epitaph 
on Lewis Nettleship in Balliol College chapel is 
a classical description of the light-bringer who 
himself is turned towards the light: "He loved 
great things, and thought little of himself: desir- 
ing neither fame nor influence, he won the devo- 
tion of men and was a power in their lives: and, 
seeking no disciples, he taught to many the great- 
ness of the world and of man's mind." 

There is a temptation known at times to most 
of us, to think so much of giving a good lesson 
that we do not trouble enough to make sure that 
what we are teaching is true. A corresponding 



i 



GUIDES AND LIGHT-BRINGERS 15 

snare is near at hand when we are pleased with 
the exercise of personal influence and proud of 
guiding others; or, worse still, when we enjoy 
tyranny over others. These evils have been 
vividly described of late years, in various novels 
which aim at showing the dangers of our profes- 
sion. These temptations are real and may come 
to us at any time, but they overcome us not in 
our "living" times but in the times of the shadow 
of death; and to keep ourselves alive by keeping 
in touch with what we serve is a very fair safe- 
guard against them. A teacher like other men 
becomes small and arrogant and complacent when, 
and because, he has ceased to "love great things." 
The fault is not incident to our profession alone. 
Indeed, the better the education that is going 
on, the less likely is it that the teacher's person 
will fill the landscape. The Montessori teacher, 
we are told, must spend most of her time in ob- 
literating herself. And every good teacher with 
a reasonable chance is providing materials and 
books, and quiet hours for study, and individual 
schemes, and self-government, and good customs 
of all kinds, which, all put together, are to do 
more for his pupils than he could ever do in his 
own person. His work, like that of almost every 
one else in the modern world, consists chiefly in 
serving by indirect and impersonal means. The 



16 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

modern business of light-bringing depends less 
often on carrying a torch than on putting in elec- 
tric wires. Or if the daylight is in question, the 
way to increase it is chiefly concerned with the re- 
duction of smoke in the atmosphere ; and that de- 
pends on turning coal into gas and persuading 
people to use it, and on inventing and building 
smoke-consuming chimneys and making mechanical 
stokers, and on setting up communal kitchens to 
reduce the number of kitchen fires. None of the 
servants of these causes will have much attention 
concentrated on his person, or be led to think 
overmuch of himself. So also little guidance is 
given now by pointing with the finger, and much 
by setting up sign-posts and keeping roads in re- 
pair, and printing monthly tables of trains. So 
also it is with the teaching profession. 



IV 

In the second place, when we are real teachers 
we learn humility through knowing our pupils. 
We find that the Light and the Way are not quite 
the same for any one of them as for ourselves. 
We give only such help as we can; they take of it 
only what they can. Our service is likely to re- 
duce itself to giving them just light enough to 
find means to other light, or putting them into a 



GUIDES AND LIGHT-BRINGERS 17 

path which will lead to another road which is not 
ours. I have been specially impressed with this 
in matters of religion. In my own memories of 
seeking help in religious difficulties in youth, and 
in later experiences of trying to help in the diffi- 
culties of other people, I have seemed to find 
again and again that an older person can never 
give to a younger one exactly what he needs. The 
most we can usually hope is that some scrap of 
a suggestion may be a little help in combining with 
other things to enable the younger person to get 
a little nearer to finding what he needs for him- 
self. And what is true of religion is true of every 
other important kind of enlightenment and guid- 
ing. The teacher's light, for the pupil, is seldom 
more than a distant street lamp shining dimly 
through his window. Along with other sources 
of light, it may enable him after some time to 
find the position of one of the electric switches 
in his room. 

Indeed, it is on this that we come rightly to 
lay stress. It is just as well that we cannot give 
our pupils a candle ready lighted to carry about 
with them, for their needs go so far beyond the 
power of a candle. The only thing worth hoping 
is that we may help them towards light-finding, 
or light-making, or road-engineering for them- 
selves. We know this is true in intellectual train- 



1 8 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

ing; it is no less true in matters of conduct. We 
can give no penny candle — no little sufficient rules 
to be carried about. If the working out of truth 
and righteousness is an intricate and solitary busi- 
ness in our own living experience, will it not be 
the same for our children? If we are still seekers 
ourselves, we shall be in little danger of patronis- 
ing those who are beginning the search. 



We shall be humble towards that which we 
serve, and towards those whom we teach, and, 
in the third place, towards all that universe which 
works together with us, and in which our work 
is so small a part. 

We are fellow-workers with the past genera- 
tions. We did not invent reading and writing, 
or discover history and geography, or work out 
the laws of number and space. We did not even 
create the means of teaching, the books and the 
schools; nor, on the whole, did even our profes- 
sion create them. Who made the orderly nation 
and the system of government which enables these 
things to exist? Who worked out the moral laws, 
and set up the great sign-posts which now we show 
to the children? The world and the age have 
entrusted us with one focus of their desire to 
pass on their work. We are gatherers-up and 



GUIDES AND LIGHT-BRINGERS 19 

transmitters of what we did not make — of what 
came first from Nature, and then from millions 
who rest in "unvisited tombs." And the universe, 
which honours us thus, first made us. 

We are fellow-workers with the present — with 
our pupils' homes and their neighbours and their 
country — and fellow-workers with the future. We 
teach our children to read, and others write and 
will write the books for them. We bring them 
a little light by which they may find their way 
to other light not brought by us. I bless my own 
school for what it did for me, yet I have no single 
possession which I can attribute to the school 
alone, much less to any one teacher. They helped 
to open doors for me, and with other help I found 
what was beyond the doors. So, now that we 
are teachers, we find that no single piece of work 
is ours alone ; that no line can be drawn anywhere 
round what "we" have done. If we bring light, it 
melts into the light that others bring. If we guide, 
it is usually in one respect only, for a moment 
only, and then the help is found in other guidance 
than ours. We have a special gift to bring, but 
we shall not exaggerate its importance, though it 
is our business to bring it. The best light 
"lighteth every man" even though our work fails. 

If we try to isolate our own work, its success 
seems indeed unstable enough: 



20 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

"When Andrew went a-fishing 
All night in Galilee, 
Dawn would bring him a heavy net, 

Or five fish, or three: 
It was just as the sea would have It, 
And fisherman's luck, said he. 

After, he went a-fishing 

For wilder fish than of yore, 

And many straining netfuls 
He drew in to shore. 

But at last they hung him cross-wise: 
Fisherman's luck once more. 



All ye that go a-fishing 

Know this of the patient art: 

Eight nights' harvest may break your nets, 
And the ninth break your heart."* 



But the thought is not complete without another 
hymn: 

"Others shall sing the song, 
Others shall right the wrong; 
Finish what I begin 
And all I fail of win. 
What matter I or they, 
Mine or another's day?" 



It need not make us less zealous to hope for 
that, and it should make us less feverish. No 



*Rose Macaulay. 



GUIDES AND LIGHT-BRINGERS 21 

man, and above all no teacher, begins or carries 
on his work by himself, or finishes it himself. It 
is carried on by all nature and all humanity, be- 
fore us and after us. 

Have we not to mean at least this, if we say 
that we share the work with God? 



II 

THE YOKE 

"Take my yoke upon you" — Matthew xi, 29. 

In one way or another, in some sense or other, 
all of us have obeyed that command. We obeyed 
it when we were born. We obeyed it at the be- 
ginning of the year; we obey it again at the end 
of every holiday, and every Monday morning, and 
every day. 

In taking a post we say sometimes that we take 
up the "burden" of duties and responsibilities; 
but a yoke is a peculiar kind of burden in that its 
burden-ness — its mass or weight — is a secondary 
quality. The yoke is not merely something that 
we struggle with and pull at, — it enables us to 
pull something else. It is an instrument for doing 
work. The Spirit that works through the minds 
of men has devised the institutions which help 
to make a nation so different from a mere col- 
lection of individuals. Posts and professions have 
been devised, governments and appointments and 
local authorities, schools and colleges and classes 

22 



THE YOKE 23 

and examinations; and all these, in their inten- 
tion, are instruments for doing work. They are 
inventions for getting work done which by mere 
impulsive application either could not be done so 
well or would not be done so certainly. The 
machinery of the State, we call them in modern 
times — they are yokes, in the language of a time 
whose instruments of industry were fewer and 
simpler. Putting on the yoke, we become part of 
the machine, part of the plough; committed, so 
long as we wear it, to going on, to walking in 
the line of greatest resistance. Offices and trades, 
membership of a society or a committee, marriage 
and motherhood, are instruments of service and 
potential compulsions to service. 

In the first place, they are instruments of 
service. Most of us, sometimes and in some part 
of our life at any rate, want to do good. A horse 
might stand in a field and want to do good for 
long enough, had not collar and harness and 
plough been invented and provided for him. 
Trades and schools and colleges and the forms of 
family life were invented before our day, and 
we enter into them. The machinery of the State, 
as truly as churches and altars, stands within the 
spiritual world. If we approach it with the mind 
of Christ, then it is Christ's yoke we are taking 
upon us. 



24 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

"Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me." 
We learn from the spiritual Christ again and 
again by means of the yoke itself. Professional 
tradition and professional compulsion guide and 
train us, and keep us in the right path when our 
private wisdom or our private resolution would 
fail. The yoke defends us against our own idle- 
ness and slackness; making us get up in the morn- 
ing, making us go out in the rain, teaching us 
every day the routine steadiness and thoroughness 
in which the average professional worker outdoes 
the average amateur. It is not only a burden 
but an anchor; something solid to hold to; some- 
thing by which we may save ourselves from self- 
absorption and morbidity and the "weight of 
chance desires." The struggling Spirit within us 
responds to the guiding and compelling Spirit em- 
bodied outside us. God besets us behind and 
before, and lays his hand upon us. 

We learn by means of the yoke ; we learn also, 
so far as we will, the way in which followers of 
Christ ought to deal with the yoke. "Not grudg- 
ingly, or of necessity." The yoke compels us to 
go a mile ; without it perhaps we should not have 
gone half a mile ; with it we are to try to go two 
miles on some days at any rate. To go beyond, 
to transcend compulsion, to give generously — 
these things we learn through secret thoughts and 



THE YOKE 25 

through bright examples, and we try to practise 
them a little sometimes. 

But there is yet another kind of learning which 
most workers need sooner or later. The yoke 
symbolises the means of service and the enlarge- 
ment of life through service, but it symbolises 
also the constraint and hardness and heaviness 
which are involved in serviceable living. Mon- 
day morning and the end of the holidays do not 
stand always for pleasant thoughts. How are we 
to deal with this constraint? 

I do not refer so specially to the unhappiness 
that may attend the first beginning of teaching 
work. The first few months can, of course, be 
a terribly hard time, but some of that hardness 
will never come again. The wave may overwhelm 
us, but it does pass; we do in the end find our 
feet and get our heads up; and the second year 
will be very different from the first. Some trou- 
bles, on the other hand, never do pass perma- 
nently, and I wish to speak of these particularly 
now. 

Few persons can be so fortunate as not to feel 
from time to time that their work, or the routine 
of their lives, or some incidental feature of these, 
is hateful to them. They may feel it after some 
years in their profession, when the first keen in- 
terest is gone, or at intervals even from the be- 



26 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

ginning. Some of the best and most promising 
workers may suffer most, since the rich and 
spirited nature which has most to give to the 
work is also the nature which finds it hardest to 
endure the work's limits. But almost all of us, 
good or bad, suffer more or less from this mood 
in which we cannot bear to go on. The mood 
is not constant, mercifully, but it will probably 
be recurrent even up to old age. 

The rebellion of heart comes to some as in- 
tolerance of the boredom and restraint. To 
others it comes rather as fear. These can tolerate 
the monotony of routine, which indeed attracts 
them at times as something safe and restful — 
it is the roughness and the hard demands of life 
they shrink from. Sometimes unhappiness con- 
centrates itself upon their own inadequacy to these 
demands. They are doing the work badly, they 
feel; they cannot manage it; they see all the holes 
and rough places in their weaving. To a nature 
which is sensitive to ideals this mood may come 
terribly often, especially if there is really some 
fault of adjustment between the worker and the 
task. 

Sometimes, on the other hand, life seems point- 
less and empty, not because we are filling our 
place badly, but because any one else (so we 
feel) could fill it equally well. There may be 



THE YOKE 27 

illusion here, but it is mixed with a very real 
trouble. The world has much work to be done 
which can be shared indifferently amongst many 
people, and it is this indifference of the yoke that 
is sometimes so hard to bear. It is in this re- 
spect chiefly that married persons may have a 
definite advantage over the unmarried. The re- 
bellion against routine, and the shrinking from 
hard demands, are common to both, but the wife 
whose husband needs her, or the mother whose 
children depend upon her, is saved for a time 
from this special bitter sense that she in her own 
person is not needed. Love makes a station 
central and unique, and there are deep instincts 
of our nature at the basis of its demand for cen- 
trality and uniqueness. The denial of these in- 
stincts, when we take our share of the indifferent 
work of the world and endure to be without a 
special office over and above it, is necessarily pain. 
With most people, fortunately, the trial does not 
last for ever. A faithful person generally wins 
to some uniqueness of position in course of time; 
he finds love or friendship somewhere, or some 
individual shape of professional work or social 
service, some special need which no one else could 
exactly supply. Yet this does not always happen ; 
or it may happen in so subtle and unobtrusive a 
form that the worker never realises what has 



28 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

come about. He feels still that he is not uniquely 
needed; he is doing honourable and necessary 
work, perhaps, but still work that others could do 
as well. So periodically the instinct cries out 
within him and he suffers. 

If this form of suffering comes chiefly to un- 
married people, one other form is certainly com- 
mon to all. Every one of us revolts sometimes, 
not explicitly against the yoke of professional life 
or family life, but against some incident of our 
particular state. We could live and work well 
and happily, we feel, if it were not for this rela- 
tive of our husband's, for this feature of the place 
where we have to live, for the absence of this 
particular thing that we need for our work, for 
this intolerable characteristic in the people we 
have to live with. We are really good workers, 
good members of a family, good members of a 
staff, but how can we live under these circum- 
stances? And thus every now and then we feel 
that it is hard to go on. 

In considering all this, one must assume, of 
course, that all the external common-sense things 
have been done. If we can rightly alter the in- 
tolerable feature, we ought to do so. If our 
lives are too narrow we ought if possible to make 
them wider. If we are a square peg in a round 
hole, we should look for a square hole if we 



THE YOKE 29 

rightly can. But after all these requirements have 
been met — after common-sense in action and the 
energy of adjustment have done all that they can 
rightly do — still much of the difficulty will often 
remain, and we must go deeper to meet it. 

It is some help even to realise what a universal 
difficulty this is. The mood of revolt against 
one's life was named fifteen hundred years ago 
as one of the torments that most easily beset us, 
and I think I have not known any one myself 
who has been permanently free from it. We need 
have no nightmare feeling that the trouble must 
mean something uniquely wrong with our own 
circumstances or our own nature. It is universal, 
and it needs a universal answer. Part of that 
answer, once more, depends on common-sense; 
common-sense in dealing with the mood as well 
as with the outward situation; mental self-help. 
Much sometimes — occasionally even an amazing 
amount — can be done by wise treatment of our 
own mind; by the practice of self-suggestion, for 
instance, as "mental healers" recommend. But 
beneath this and supporting it and going beyond 
it, what can we find to say? 

Only that this is life. This is doing one's share 
in carrying the world. This is the Christ in us 
taking up the yoke again. 

The whole hardness that we shrink from be- 



30 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

longs to the yoke. It is part of the work, not a 
hindrance to it. The monotony, the lack of 
uniqueness, the lack of visible result, the hard class 
and the difficult companions and the weakness in 
our own nature, all these are part of the materials. 
We think of them as hedges we have to climb 
over before we can reach the field to be ploughed; 
unsanctified hindrances that pull us back and make 
us late and spoil our chance in the work that we 
are here to do. But they are not hedges on the 
way — they are parts of the field. With just these 
we have to deal, to work them in to a courageous 
and faithful life. The God in men who, genera- 
tion after generation, has carried the burden and 
ploughed the mountain side, lives now in us that 
this place may be filled. We learn of him, as he 
has worked in all who have ever served their 
generation, and as he works now in our souls. 

We are to "learn." These difficulties, outside 
us and within us, are not things that we ought to 
be able to deal with easily at once; that we are 
to blame for not mastering at once. They are 
the day's lesson and the life's lesson, to be studied 
bit by bit under the most patient of teachers. On 
a Monday morning we are not commanded simply 
to ge the field ploughed, and left to stand shiver- 
ing before an impossible task. We are just to 
take up the yoke, of our own body, our own 



THE YOKE 31 

character, our own circumstance, and then to 
learn. 

"Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in 
heart." We do not use these words often now, 
but the idea we need has not changed. It is the 
dropping of fuss and fret and grabbing and in- 
ward resistance, and fuming over our private 
rights and private fears and personal hatreds, and 
the turning to loyalty, to large-mindedness, to 
the share in a greater spirit. To learn of him 
is to try, again and again, to take up every neces- 
sary burden in that spirit, and to drop, again and 
again, all the little burdens of egoistic cares that 
we need not carry at all. It is to drop our bundles 
at the foot of that Cross which is erected anew 
every day, and then to take up the yoke instead. 
In this spirit we can use its very sharpness and 
heaviness to keep our learning power awake and 
growing. 

Short of this spirit there is no answer for any 
of us. If we refuse to learn it, the easiest life 
in the world becomes intolerable in the end, but 
we need not refuse. The weakest of us need not 
refuse; we can learn it in tiny bits, a few minutes 
at a time, as babies learn. With each morsel that 
we learn, the end of the text comes true: "Ye 
shall find rest unto your souls." Here and now, 
in the middle of work or with work beginning 



32 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

next week, we can find it. When we lose it, as 
we shall do many many times, we can turn and 
find it again. 



Ill 

THE GOOD DAY 

"Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his 
courts with praise." — Psalm c. 4. 

"Defraud not thyself of the good day." — Ecclesias- 
ticus xiv. 14. 

I 

In past times we used to praise content, but of 
late years we have not said much about it; we 
have been too much afraid of seeming to com- 
mend the vice that goes by the same name, — the 
making shift with bad conditions when we ought 
to change them. Yet in avoiding this vice we 
may miss the real virtue; the acceptance of good 
things graciously and gratefully. 

We may omit the gracious reception of good 
things, and become discourteous towards life and 
grudging towards ourselves, from many causes. 
One cause is the natural impulse to look forward 
and lean forward. If what happens to-day does 
not catch our attention by being unpleasant, we 
tend to ignore it in favour of what is going to 

33 



34 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

happen to-morrow. The present, we feel ob- 
scurely, is here and can look after itself; we must 
be looking after what is not yet here. To-day is 
all very well; to-morrow is really worth thinking 
about. 

Or it may be the cowardly part of our nature 
which defrauds us of our good days. "Think of 
the dreadful things that are going to happen or 
that may be going to happen," it whispers; or 
"think of all the bad things that have happened 
or that may have happened." It can always find 
something to offer us, because it is perfectly true 
that something always may have happened and 
always may be going to happen. Our road does 
wind about in the midst of volcanoes. 

Or it may be a twisted scrupulousness that de- 
frauds us. "Surely," it says, "if you are not doing 
anything unpleasant at the moment, there must be 
something coming that you ought to be thinking 
of and preparing for; or something past that you 
ought to be repenting of and planning to make 
amends for. It can't be right to have a free 
mind." Or it reminds us in some form of the 
old contrast between the steep and narrow path 
and the primrose way. "Surely," it says, "we 
must be on the wrong path if we are finding prim- 
roses." 

None of these suggestions can be answered once 



THE GOOD DAY 35 

for all in the abstract. Sometimes it is true that 
we ought to be looking for another path, or pre- 
paring for unpleasant things. But often — very 
often indeed for some of us — this is simply the 
voice of a bad habit. Often we ought not to be 
counting up volcanoes. We ought not to be work- 
ing ourselves into a nervous breakdown by look- 
ing round continually for undefined duties and 
worries that we think we must have forgotten. 
Often we ought to have a free mind, if there is 
anything in the New Testament references to the 
glorious liberty of the children of God. And we 
ought often to be using that free mind in gracious 
and grateful reception of the good things that 
life has to give. There are primroses on all 
paths, and they are often better on the right road 
than on the wrong, and when they smile at us 
we ought to smile back at them. 

It is often said that grief has lessons to teach 
us which happiness cannot teach; but the opposite 
is true also; happiness has lessons of its own. 
(And we shall not be able to take grief with sim- 
plicity when it comes, if meanwhile we are not 
taking happiness with simplicity.) We have 
duties of courtesy and attentiveness equally 
towards both. Being happy, indeed, is itself one 
of the chief lessons. The power of enjoyment is 
a great strength and a great charm. The person 



36 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

who has lost the power of enjoying himself has 
lost much, and we do lose it if we lose the habit 
of practising it. If we miss all our chances of 
freedom of mind and cleanness of mind, if we 
go on slurring over our times of happiness with- 
out being happy in them, then some day they 
will offer themselves in vain. 

So, when good and pleasant things come to us, 
we are to rise and welcome them with the whole 
of our heart. They are blessed, and we are 
blessed in them. We are to enter into the gates 
of the good day with praise. 



II 

"With praise and thanksgiving." When things 
go well with us, we are told we must thank God. 
But what if we believe that these primroses have 
bloomed not on our behalf, and not through any 
intervention from above Nature, but by the ordi- 
nary processes of the natural world, by the same 
indifferent laws which presently will wither the 
flowers and bring the east wind. How will this 
bear on the question of thanksgiving? When the 
good day comes to us, we seem to have a true 
human impulse in a surging up of thankfulness 
that needs to go somewhere. If we are honest, 
are we forbidden to be thankful? 



THE GOOD DAY 37 

What is implied when we thank a man? Some- 
times we imply that he has done this service on 
purpose to please us; but is this always so? Most 
of us, probably, have felt grateful to some writer 
or soldier or statesman who never heard of us. 

Again, in our ordinary gratitude, do we always 
assume the presence of a special and deliberate 
purpose ? We may not put our thanks into words, 
but our hearts go out to our friends for little 
casual, inevitable acts which have expressed their 
characters while they were scarcely attending. 
We love and thank them for being what they are. 

One step more. In the spontaneous impulse of 
grateful pleasure, are we loving and thanking 
our friend, or the good book, or the sunny day, 
and stopping there? I believe not. I suggest 
this, — that we love and thank what they are, 
what lives in them. I suggest that in actual fact 
we are recognising and loving not something shut 
up in an isolated particular person or thing, but 
something which lives in them and can go beyond 
them. In them we love and greet love itself, or 
human kindness, or valour, or wisdom, or beauty 
and splendour made visible. It is not a mere 
general abstraction that we praise, but neither 
is it a merely particular instance. It is the spirit 
in the body, — the word made flesh. 



38 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

III 

These thoughts seem to leave meaning enough 
in "thanking God for the good day." Yet if at 
a certain time of our religious development we 
distrust the old associations of the words, let us 
speak instead of "loving the day," and let us see 
that we put the full meaning into that. Thank- 
fulness is one side of love, — the outgoing generous 
side as opposed to the element that grasps and 
pulls at its object to possess it. When we "give 
thanks" we are loving and not grasping. We 
are recognising, appreciating, worshipping. We 
are not demanding that our object shall respond to 
us in particular, nor that it shall have been de- 
signed specially for us. We are loving it grate- 
fully for being what it is. And, in letting our 
hearts go forth to it, we are not checking and 
confining them to this as a single thing. We are 
letting it open our eyes to the soul of all the good 
in the world. In the sunset or the picture, we 
worship not that beautiful thing only, but beauty; 
in the splendid deed we praise courage and splen- 
dour, and the spirit of human beings that can reach 
them. When our moved hearts become philo- 
sophic (as I think emotion easily makes them be- 
come) so as to feel an identity of soul in every 
good, they say to that soul in quite instinctive 



THE GOOD DAY 39 

and natural form, "We praise thee, we bless thee, 
we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks 
to thee for thy great glory." If in the deepest 
and fullest sense we are loving the good thing, 
then in all essentials, in everything but using the 
ancient name for the "author and giver of all 
good things," we have already thanked God. 

I am not claiming that we can put into this 
thought of thanksgiving, unchanged, all that a 
child puts into it before his difficulties arise. The 
most perfect condition for recognition and love 
may be that we should meet a mind that is de- 
liberately and specially loving us back. If on a 
child's birthday there comes a fine day between 
snowstorms, it must be pleasant to think that this 
exquisite possession of blue and silver is a birth- 
day present sent straight to him from a godfather 
in the sky. Yet the humbler and austerer thought 
of an older mind is worth having. We do not 
believe that the day is fine because it is our birth- 
day, yet we pause over it and love it: and in it 
and through it we greet beauty and radiance, and 
tranquility after storm, and the spirit of "all good 
things." "He that loveth" does more than get 
a present from God; he is born of God. 

And then, being born of God, we also become 
authors and givers of good things. We become 
servants of the spirit of happiness and beauty. 



40 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

We are to help and protect it and make more 
room for it; diligently to make the world more 
beautiful because we have seen the beauty already 
there; to take pains quickly to make other people 
happier because we have been happy ourselves. 
This is the central gift of a happy time : that 
in it we may get the better of the churlish and 
snatching hurry with which we are apt to go 
through life, head down and eyes blind. We can 
practise welcome and graeiousness, and can smile 
at the primroses, even if we do not think they 
are smiling deliberately at us. In the u good day" 
we can learn to put out an ungrudging hand to 
join with all the friendliness and loveliness in the 
world, and to make new ways and windows for 
it. Trouble will come again soon enough; we 
shall have sunshine between snowstorms always. 
But meanwhile we shall have learnt something 
of looking out for good and entertaining it; of 
welcoming all of life that we can. Perhaps the 
parts that we feel it impossible to welcome will 
become fewer and fewer as we practise more. 
With every bit of practice we shall gain some- 
thing at any rate of a recognising and responsive 
heart, "unfeignedly thankful." 



IV 
GOD THE PRISONER 

"I was in prison, and ye came unto me." — Matt. xxv. 36. 

One of the commonest categories in our thought 
is that of chains, bonds, obstacles, things that 
hinder other things. We could keep our children 
interested if it were not for the bad ventilation 
or the noise in the street. We could give our 
whole mind to our work, but for troubles at home. 
We could make more friends, but for our awk- 
wardness and shyness; we could keep more, but 
for defects in our temper or in theirs. We run 
in weights. We have a double task, always push- 
ing one thing out of the way while we try to deal 
with another. 

Certainly thought of this kind is not always 
quite accurate or clear. Circumstances hinder our 
good purposes, we say; but we find sometimes 
that the fault lies less in outside obstacles than 
in a defect of the purpose. Our ideal has been 
too abstract: we are trying to work across the 
grain of our material, and the hindrances accord- 

41 



42 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

ingly are endless. Or it may be that the purpose 
is too narrowly conceived. When we teach, is the 
stupidity of our pupils a hindrance, or is it an 
element in our problem? The latter, surely, if 
we conceive our business to be that of doing our 
best for children of a given amount of ability. 
But, as we work, our purpose easily narrows itself 
into "getting so much learnt this week," and then 
the children's dulness becomes a hindrance and a 
handicap. 

The conception of hindrances does not always 
give us ultimate truth — it is picture-thinking, and 
adjustable. Still, it is a picture which stands for 
something real. The more we fall into concen- 
tration on a special piece of work — a useful and 
wholesome attitude in many ways — the more this 
category of chains and hindrances recurs. It 
seems worth an experiment in thought. Let us 
use it, then, in order to see what comes of it in 
religion. 



One use of it is easy and common but clearly 
wrong. We conceive the hindrances are dividing 
us from God. He is free and above us, we think, 
and we are chained; we struggle towards him and 
cannot reach him. We must get so much good 
work done if we are to please him, and we cannot 



GOD THE PRISONER 43 

get it done. Whatever is true, this idea is false. 
What is true, then? 

In the first place, I suggest that when we pic- 
ture the universe as a world of obstacles, we 
ought always to picture God as being with us in 
the midst of them. If chains and hindrances 
exist, God bears them. It is his work in which 
we are hindered, and he is hindered in us. The 
chains of our fear, our stupidity, our ignorance, 
bind him. His expression through us is obstructed 
by our bad memory, our irrelevant worries, our 
delicate health, our hatred of beginning work. 
Defects in the organisation of school and of so- 
ciety hinder him. He is handicapped by foolish 
fashions, and by our past and present faults and 
mistakes. He in us is tied and bound with the 
chain of our sins. 

Secondly: He is in prison and we can come 
to him. Every good deed, outside us or within 
us, works towards setting him free. He is in 
prison in the neglected child, in the school that 
needs reform, in the ignorant and unsympathetic 
parent, the irritating pupil, the irritable fellow- 
worker. He is in prison in the weakness of our 
self; and every patient strengthening of our feeble 
mind and will, and every cutting away of a false 
opinion or a bad habit, strikes off one of his 
chains. He is in prison in a badly organised so- 



44 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

ciety. It is said sometimes that improvements in 
social machinery are valueless, because all good 
depends on character. Yet the answer has been 
made, that social machinery may roll away the 
stone from the grave of Lazarus. Yes, and more * f 
it may roll away the stone for Easter. 

But thirdly, the work of liberation will never 
be finished while time lasts. One chain is broken; 
we go a little further, and we find that a longer 
chain still holds us. We take up a new and greater 
work, and the new obstacles are greater than the 
old. Christ comes out of the grave to enter into 
the hearts of cowards and heathen. 

Consider the spirit working upwards through 
inorganic nature, through the plant, through the 
animal, always against pressure. Nature de- 
veloped up to man — God was in prison and man 
came to him; and man gave him new freedom and 
also new bondage, a new death of the soul as 
well as its resurrection from the dead. The 
higher the being, the more intricate are the diffi- 
culties of the greater work. This is the law of 
the universe, that all work is done with chained 
hands. 

Last month I saw the moving pictures of the 
Battle of the Ancre. The description said, "At 
the signal, the troops leap forward." When the 
picture came, the leaping translated itself into 



GOD THE PRISONER 45 

crawling, hampered by the rifle, up a cliff of mud, 
and then plodding and stumbling over an endless 
distance of impossible ground. This is war. 

We had "The Lady with the Lamp," and our 
vision and our school descriptions of Saint Flor- 
ence Nightingale; and then Sir Edward Cook's 
great biography translated our abstract into the 
concrete, and we saw the despotic invalid woman 
of genius, struggling with obstacles within and 
without, wearing out herself and others in the 
effort to correct what was wrong. This is saint- 
ship. Saints are not a different kind of people 
from ourselves, nor are they walking on any 
different kind of road; they have only gone a little 
further, and the road is no smoother further on. 

School sermons sometimes speak of home (in 
contrast with school) as a place where there are 
no misunderstandings, no coldness or difficulties, 
no oppression and no distrust. It is an abstract 
that brings out some elements of truth; but a 
home in the concrete — the actual group of brothers 
and sisters and parents — is something much more 
complicated and much more moving. It is a group 
of human beings holding together at best, held 
together at worst, through friction and hin- 
drances; pathetically holding together. The 
bonds of companionship are sometimes ropes for 



46 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

life-saving and sometimes fetters, and continually 
they are both on the same day. 

In Europe now we see, working out before our 
eyes, what a Revolution really is : the shifting 
stumbling-blocks, the grouping in twilight, the 
conflicting aims of the parties, the entanglement 
of ideals, the showers of advice and criticism and 
misrepresentation, the dangers that have to be 
painfully avoided, that may have to be gone 
through and paid for. Liberty is established only 
by chained hands. 

II 

We try sometimes to paint the hindrances as 
the work of the devil. "An enemy has done this" ; 
and an enemy is not so irrelevant or distracting 
as a disagreeing friend. Sometimes we can use 
this device, but often it seems much too simple. 
Think of plants struggling with each other for 
room, with the weather alternately helping and 
hindering each of them; or a rabbit bringing up 
her young, hiding them from the stoat who wants 
them for her children to live upon. On whose 
side is the devil? Again, that which hinders now 
has often helped before; a bodily organ, or a 
system of theology, or a social institution may 
become a hindrance in the end, and yet may have 
stood for a great advance in its day. The rope 



GOD THE PRISONER 47 

helps us up before it pulls us down. The knot 
had to be firm if it was to help us, so we take 
a long time in untying it now. And it may still 
be helping in some quarters while it hinders in 
others. And it is tied not only round our hands 
but round our hearts. Even if that were not so, 
we should find it tied round other people's hearts 
which themselves are tied to ours. Walt Whit- 
man tells us to examine everything that we have 
been taught, and to reject everything that con- 
flicts with our own soul. We have to do a good 
deal of that, but there are few who find it an 
easy process or a painless one. You remember 
Stevenson's fable in which all the people torment 
themselves by wearing a fetter on their right 
ankle, and Jack thinks he has only to strike down 
the magician to cure it all. He does strike down 
the magician, in one beloved shape after another, 
and finally kills him. Then Jack goes home, and 
he has killed his friends also, and everybody has 
begun to wear a fetter on the left ankle. 

And sometimes, up to the last moment, our 
prison is not only a prison but a shelter, or some- 
thing more. Fetters may strengthen us if our 
strength grows by means of our efforts to break 
them. The statue imprisoned in the stone is also 
the stone asking to be made into a statue. The 
baby's prison may be its mother's body which 



48 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

gives it life. It may be right to break prison, yet 
not right to say that the devil built it. 

Sometimes we say instead that God built the 
prison; that he sent the obstacles either for our 
punishment or for our training. There may be 
truth in that picture also, so long as we remember 
that in doing this God must tie his own hands as 
well as ours. 

At any rate the prison and the endless prison- 
breaking are the law of the universe. And the 
God of such a universe can only be a bearer of 
chains. 

Ill 

Perhaps our image of God living in the sky 
is one of those which hinder us now though they 
helped us at first. If we use that image still, we 
must complete it: 

"For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 

If he does sit in the sky, his feet are chained to 
the earth. We think of him sometimes as able 
to shake it off so easily, to withdraw at any mo- 
ment from an obstinate nation or an inhospitable 
heart. Hosea taught us the opposite many cen- 
turies ago — "How shall I give thee up, Eph- 
raim?" We and God do not find it easy to get 
away from each other. And the real point is 



GOD THE PRISONER 49 

that we do not ever get away. He is involved in 
everything upon earth; bound up in it hand and 
foot. 

I have found this sometimes — that when one 
has been thinking of Europe's hungry children and 
then turns to "say one's prayers," there is a cer- 
tain feeling of meanness in it, as of turning one's 
back upon a great agony to look for private com- 
fort. There is certainly something wrong about 
the image here. Whatever view we hold about 
feeding the hungry, we cannot be turning away 
from it when we turn to God. 

"Why does God allow a great war, even one?" 
people ask. I think we get nearest the truth, 
amongst short answers, if we say that he could 
not help it. When the weakest elements in our 
self or in humanity get into a tangle, then the 
best and the strongest have to work it out and 
pay for it. "He that is greatest among you shall 
be your servant." The greatest self in us, and 
the best in mankind, is the bond-servant of the 
rest — the chained slave. But however we think 
of the authorship, there is no doubt where the 
suffering lies. If you picture God as Love stand- 
ing outside the fighters, then by virtue of love 
he must suffer with every one of them. If you 
picture him as immanent in them, then in the 
courage of the men on both sides, in the loyalty 



50 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

of the women on both sides, in the patience of 
the animals and the children, God is enduring. 
He is torn in pieces, divided against himself — or 
not against himself, perhaps, since splendour and 
tragedy on opposite sides do not destroy each 
other — but still divided; rent and broken. "This 
is my body which is given for you." 

His body is given in the social struggle. It is 
given in the long agony of the working-out of 
moral or religious thought, in one soul after an- 
other. "What is it right to believe?" "What 
is it that we ought to do?" Many of us must 
have known times when it was the indecision and 
the dimness that seemed the worst burden of all. 
We could stand up to our task, however painful, 
if we could only be certain. "We cross the river 
on stepping-stones of uncertainty," I have heard 
a man say. "And," he added, "we shall not get 
easily out of our world of difficulties." On such 
lines, and by such means, worlds are made. 

God's body is given, once more, in every 
struggle and constraint and sense of imprison- 
ment within our own nature. We do not often 
recognise it at the time. Our impulse is that of 
mere hate and rebellion and attempt to escape. 
"Who shall deliver me from this body of death?" 
We hope, perhaps, that it is our fleshly body which 
hinders us, and that we need only die to be rid 



GOD THE PRISONER 51 

of it in a moment, to leap into freedom and 
heaven. Meanwhile here we are tied down by our 
weakness of will, by our lack of concentration, by 
our nervousness, by our ill-temper; by mistakes, 
not now to be undone, which have shut us into a 
trap of circumstances; by misdeeds present and 
past. And we cry out, "Art not thou our God who 
settest the captives free?" "Of the pitifulness of 
thy great mercy loose us." 

Our prison warders will disappear only when 
our souls die, because the life in us both is the 
same. Freedom does come at times, and for 
a time, through the disappearance of a prison wall. 
But for the most part we only dig through that 
wall very slowly and with a great deal of pains, 
and then we find another wall beyond, to the 
end of our lives. "We shall not get easily out 
of our world of difficulties." The immediate free- 
dom is of another kind; it comes, not through los- 
ing the prison, but through finding company. If 
we are shut up within our own mood and our 
own nature and our own circumstance, God is in 
that same prison, and we can come to him. 

"We must break this chain," we say im- 
petuously; and then after a time, despairingly or 
frantically, "We can't break it." We must drag 
it with us, and work in spite of it, until it is worn 
out; but we can make the god within us take up 



52 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

its burden. Every self that we have tries to resist 
burdens and slip them off, except the god in us. 
We can cast all our care upon him. 

This it is for us, and for humanity, to be pris- 
oners and yet free. We are '"up against a stone 
wall," and it may take more than our lifetime and 
more than the whole of time to destroy it. Yet 
even while they stand, "stone walls do not a prison 
make," if God is on this side of the wall. The 
cell we share with him is a home and a palace, 
an office and a factory, — General Headquarters. 



OPPORTUNITIES 

"Serving the opportunity." — Romans xii. 11 (marginal 
alternative in R.V.). 

"Gathered together .... to serve." — Psalm ciL 22 

I 

The texts seem specially appropriate to a school. 
A course of study or teaching is one of the things 
that people do call an opportunity. Here it is, 
and we are meeting a number of persons whom 
we never met before, and we are finding new of- 
fices and duties and pleasures and new subjects 
to learn; and, besides all these, we are finding 
new qualities and powers in ourselves. And all 
these are gathered together for a time and will 
work together for a time, and then they will 
separate again. Just this combination, of these 
persons and objects and qualities, has never hap- 
pened before in the history of the world, and 
will never be repeated. 

But this is true not only of a marked-out time 
like our school work; it is true of every day and 

53 



54 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

hour of our lives. Always we have a unique com- 
bination; certain persons, certain selves within 
these persons, certain circumstances and features 
of the world, gathering together and going on for 
a while and then parting; a movement within the 
everlasting flow and change which is also the eter- 
nal universe. For we look at time very unphilo- 
sophically if we think of each day and hour as 
wiped out as soon as it has passed; and I do 
not mean only that the effects continue. The suc- 
cessive parts of life are not pictures on a slate, 
each in turn wiped out to make room for the 
next. They are pictures on a moving canvas, and 
each is real eternally, even if we were annihilated 
as soon as our painting was finished. To-day these 
persons and these things and these occasions are 
gathered together, to create together a part of 
eternal life whilst their meeting lasts. 

We are to "serve" this opportunity, says St. 
Paul, if the reading is correct. The first idea, for 
some of us, may be rather that I have to make the 
opportunity serve me; it is "my" opportunity, my 
property to use for my own benefit. But St. Paul 
seems to think it is less my property than my 
charge. I am to take care of it and do what it 
asks or needs, lest it should be lost. I and the 
day meet together, and from our meeting we have 
to make the finest bit of life that we can. We 



OPPORTUNITIES 55 

are to be fellow artists and good partners, and 
the egoist is apt to be a bad partner and a bad 
artist. 

In another respect also our egoism drops away. 
An opportunity usually means something that 
comes to us over and above what we have made 
and earned. We do speak sometimes of "mak- 
ing" an opportunity, but more commonly it is not 
my earnings but my luck; free grace in my hands. 
I earned my scholarship, I might say, and so 
"made" my chance of going to college. But did 
I earn the excellent teaching of the one who pre- 
pared me, or my good health which enabled me 
to work, or even my liking for the subject? Was 
it my prudence and foresight that chose parents 
who would keep me at school? Did I make the 
donors of the scholarship wealthy, or give them 
the enlightenment to use their wealth in that way? 
Did I establish the college? did I create the learn- 
ing and the friendship that made it rich "beyond 
all that we desired cr deserved"? My desert 
and my earnings shrink, in comparison, to some- 
thing very insignificant. If once you begin to 
count and analyse, then, as the mission hymn says 
quaintly, "it will surprise you what the Lord hath 
done." 

Each must judge for herself, but many of us, 
I believe, must admit this. Often enough we are 



56 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

grasping and ungracious. "I ought to have this." 
"I deserve to get that." If we can measure our 
deserts, I at least have had so much more than 
they could bring me; so much that had nothing 
to do with what I deserved; opportunities heaped 
up and poured before me. I have needed only, 
as we all need, to wait upon them and to serve 
them. 

II 

Perhaps we do not often realise how much of 
our actual life is of this kind — not making or even 
earning our materials, but using them as they 
come. Consider the small experience of trying to 
write an essay. We search for thoughts and come 
again and again to wait for them, and put our 
minds into a state of expectation for them, and 
we catch them as they flit through our minds, and 
we follow up one in the hope that it may lead us 
to another; and when we have enough we put 
them together and use them. This is how the 
process feels to me; never creating thoughts, but 
finding them and serving them. Or consider even 
our power of conversation. When I was a girl 
I was miserably oppressed by my own shy silence ; 
and a woman who had suffered in the same way 
advised me to make a habit of speaking out the 
stray thoughts that passed through my mind. It 
came somehow as a new idea to me, that to 



OPPORTUNITIES 57 

"make" a remark depends on thoughts that you 
do not make but find, and that even the best 
talkers are only waiting on thoughts that come 
to them, and giving them words. 

In small matters and in great, we live by wait- 
ing on our material and co-operating with it as 
we can. A little of that material we earned or 
deserved, for good or evil, but most of it, for good 
or evil, goes much beyond that measure. Here, 
new every day, is our opportunity, our partner, 
our chance, our charge. What can be made out 
of our meeting? 

Here are all of us, gathered by chance, to work 
for a while together. Shall we make amongst us 
a good and happy year of the school life ? Surely, 
yes. We shall fall into groups as time goes on; 
we shall have some superficial cross-purposes and 
friction, since we are still so imperfect. But per- 
sons of good will can co-operate underneath the 
surface friction and in spite of it. I have seen 
a tangled disagreement where at last the wisest 
person in the group tackled the disputed point, and 
they settled it and worked well afterwards. I 
asked how it was done, and she said only, "I was 
sure we meant the same thing." 

Here for each of us, again, is the group of 
personalities which make up her own self; per- 
sonalities which sometimes seem not to be meaning 



58 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

the same thing at all. I may or may not be re- 
sponsible for their gathering together in me; I 
did not make myself in the beginning, though I 
have partly made myself since. But whether I 
am responsible or not, here now is my oppor- 
tunity. These selves within me, these moods and 
emotions and impulses, these qualities with their 
strength and their weakness, different from hour 
to hour, these must make each hour their picture 
on the moving canvas, their bit of eternal life 
which no one else can make, "ere to the wind's 
four quarters I take my endless way." 

Or consider our bodily nature. I am to serve 
my body, to keep it in health, to keep my face 
cheerful and peaceful even when I feel gloomy, 
and so far as I do this "my brother the body" 
will give back health and peace to my soul, as 
far as can be — u soul helping flesh no more than 
flesh helps soul." Or remember all our little 
brothers and sisters, the inanimate things. You 
keep your room dainty and orderly and clean, and 
you know then how when you come in tired and 
ruffled the room quiets you, and your bed puts 
its arm round you at night. In this once more 
we are less egoists than we think; we do not de- 
mand, before we let these things comfort us, that 
the room and the bed shall have been thinking 



OPPORTUNITIES 59 

about us and holding out arms to us in particular. 
Our meeting was the opportunity, and we made 
of it what should be made. "Here is peace," says 
the room, or the house, or Nature, and we enter 
in. The lovely autumn came to us, and we and 
it together made that part of eternal life which 
consists in the love of something beautiful. Every 
season, every day of our lives, comes to walk 
with us for a little way, and we work and play 
together. 

This is the great gift of friendliness towards 
life. "The battle of life," we say, and we some- 
times think of life as being the enemy. Mary 
Cholmondeley describes an old woman who "had 
the tight-lipped, bitter look of one who has coldly 
appropriated as her due all the good things of 
life, who has fiercely rebelled against every un- 
toward event, and who now in old age offers a 
passive, impotent resistance to anything that sug- 
gests a change. She had had an easy, comfortable 
existence, but her life had gone hard with her, 
and her face showed it." But life is our chance, 
our comrade, our fellow-worker, our fellow-player 
in wrestling. "Boys and girls, come out to play," 
it says to us, and we answer according as we are 
spiritually sensitive in the first place, and cour- 
ageous in the second place. 



60 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

III 

We need first sensitiveness of hearing for the 
call; perceptiveness and wisdom of spiritual judg- 
ment. Where we are careless or thick-skinned or 
self-absorbed, we fail to notice that any occasion 
is calling to us. The person who is unperceptive 
of other people's feelings, for instance, will miss 
half the facts in the situations that he meets, and 
will go comfortably blundering on without ever 
knowing the damage he is doing on all hands. 
Good manners are based on the tact, the sense of 
mental touch, which feels the situation and fits 
it exactly. And the wisdom which works out the 
right answer in a complex question of conduct is 
only a wider and more reasoned exercise of the 
same discernment. When we have to decide day 
by day in the holidays between doing our college 
work and helping our mothers, or when in term- 
time we have to fit social duties and friendly duties 
and intellectual duties together, no abstract rules 
can help us very much; each situation must have 
its own problem worked out for itself. Long ago, 
when I was much troubled about problems of this 
kind, I remember an older person saying that 
we ought to take broad views of life and not 
fuss about details. That is the natural view for 
wholesome maturity, but I still think it is not much 
good to hold it up to youth except as a hope for 



OPPORTUNITIES 61 

the future. The skilled and practised person 
does not fuss about details so much as the beginner, 
but the beginner can hardly help it if he is at- 
tentive at all. Also I think a girl student has 
problems of conflicting duties which are quite as 
difficult as most that she is likely to meet after- 
wards, and much more incessant and pressing than 
most of the later problems are likely to be. 

All we can do is to judge the concrete situa- 
tion as well as we can, and then refuse to fret 
about it afterwards. The Church itself can only 
sum up virtue as doing my duty in the station of 
life to which it shall please God to call me, and 
that station is unique for every person in every 
hour. Inner discernment grows with practice and 
is blunted with lack of practice, even in its highest 
forms of wisdom, and depth of insight, and wide 
and delicate response. The persons we reverence 
most have practised a long time and used a great 
deal of experience before they reached that ex- 
cellence of judgment and control of will which can 
meet a situation, new or old, and do exactly the 
right thing. 

IV 

Such persons have practised the other quality 
also; they have been, or have made themselves, 
not only alert and attentive but courageous. 



62 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

Whether they felt faint-hearted or not, they have 
met the call of the opportunity. They have "gone 
out to play." 

The friendly and serviceable attitude towards 
life is also of necessity the courageous attitude. 
To meet with friendliness the difficult as well as 
the easy event; to serve and save the hardest situa- 
tion; to treat pains and fears and burdens as op- 
portunities; this is the work of a very gallant 
person, and the more afraid the more gallant. 
"Facing facts," or "making the best of every- 
thing" — these are implied in serving the oppor- 
tunity, but they are also synonyms for courage. If 
discernment is the inner delicacy with which we 
know a situation, courage is the inner energy and 
momentum and staying power with which we meet 
it. It is the concentration which keeps the present 
clean for its own work, useless worries about the 
past and fears about the future being laid aside or 
at least held aside. Courage, with wisdom be- 
hind it, makes that wonderful and precious kind of 
person who, you know with certainty, will not fail 
you. 

To the courageous person's friends and fellow- 
workers his courage appears as restfulness and 
strength. To the person himself, it may rather 
be akin to feeling as weak as water, only, in spite 
of all weakness and emptiness, trying to keep his 



OPPORTUNITIES 63 

face turned one way. The strongest person in the 
world lives from hand to mouth because life is so 
much stronger than he. At the margin of our 
living, we have no power to meet the situation 
till it comes, and then, if our will is right, we have 
it. Whether we have "earned" that power or not 
we find hard to calculate and rather irrelevant. 
When we look back afterwards on such an 
occasion, the power may appear a good deal more 
than any of our earnings. Courage, once more, 
is not only staying power but adventure. Middle- 
aged people tend too much to think of duty as 
something ordered and settled — the following of 
lines laid down. It had a more exciting side for 
St. Paul at any rate, all his life. Duty is the 
filling of a station that is always new; it is meet- 
ing an opportunity that has never occurred before ; 
it is meeting with new comrades and new ma- 
terials and co-operating to make the best result 
possible. We are standing yet in the first morn- 
ing of creation. 



A fine thinker has spoken of the experience of 
a craftsman in handling "clay, or metal, or wood, 
or molten glass. It is alive in your hands, and 
its life grows or rather magically springs into 
shapes which it, and you in it, seem to desire and 



64 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

feel inevitable. The feeling for the medium, the 
sense of what can rightly be done in it only, or 
better than in anything else, and the charm and 
fascination of doing it so — these are the real clue 
to the fundamental question of aesthetics."* In 
reading this passage I thought first, This might 
be the description of good teaching — the class and 
the lesson coming alive in the teacher's hands and 
all three carrying on the work together. Next 
I thought, it is like good committee work or good 
administration — "the state of things" alive in 
the hands of governors so sensitive that they feel 
in it the desired and inevitable shape, and so 
skilful that they can help it to take on that shape. 
Finally, it is the description of the whole art of 
living — "the feeling for the situation, the sense 
of what can rightly be done in it only, or better 
than in any situation else," and the skill and 
courage to do just that. I have taken ourselves 
to be the craftsmen and our circumstances the ma- 
terial, but the point is that both sides co-operate, 
and we might turn the image the other way round, 
and make our spirit the material on which life 
works. Be fervent in spirit, says our translation; 
glowing metal, ready to run into the shape that 
is needed and to hold fast there. 

We have returned to the thought of comrades 



^Bernard Bosanquet, Lectures on ^Esthetics, p. 60. 



OPPORTUNITIES 65 

working together in creation. The fundamental 
condition is that they must "mean the same 
thing." The craftsman feels and helps the de- 
sire of the material, and the man doing right is 
he who feels and helps the needs of the situa- 
tion, the will of the grouped facts. If your will 
is at one with the need of the universe, then co- 
operation at bottom cannot fail. "Thou shalt be 
in league with the stones of the field." 

The craftsman and the statesman, the teacher 
and the mother, and the good soldier and the 
great leader, all in their own departments know 
the sense of having their wills at one with the 
will and need and purpose of what goes beyond 
themselves. In religious experience we know this 
behind every department. In such moments our 
will has gathered up the need of the whole world, 
and is in tune with the endeavour of every helper 
and saviour of the world. In such moments we 
feel without any argument that, in spite of every 
appearance to the contrary, all is well with us. 
All matter becomes our material; all obstacles are 
opportunities. The whole of life is our great op- 
portunity, not earned but given. We wish one 
another good luck for the year, but in such mo- 
ments we know that we cannot have bad luck — 
that all is safe. 



66 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

"We have found safety with all things undying, 
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth, 

The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying, 
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth. 

Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall; 
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all." 



VI 

CHILDISHNESS 

"When I became a man, I put away childish things." — 
,1 Cor. xiii, 11. 

I 

This is the only passage, in our English transla- 
tion of the Bible, in which the deprecatory word 
"childish" appears. It seems to stand for some- 
thing not bad so much as defective; something 
which appears naturally at the beginning of 
growth, but which in the course of normal growth 
ought to be put away. "That which is in part," 
St. Paul calls it — it ought to give way presently 
to the fuller and clearer reality, "that which is 
perfect." 

His use refers primarily to the intellectual side 
of life, — to knowledge as a child has it, wavering, 
piecemeal, confused. We use the term even 
oftener of the passional side. A man is "childish" 
when his desires and impulses are piecemeal and 
uncoordinated; when his purposes waver because 
desires carry him now this way and now that way; 

67 



68 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

when he cannot subordinate the need of the mo- 
ment, or the fear of the moment, to deeper needs 
and deeper fears. We think of a child specially 
as being helpless to coordinate and systematise. 
He is small, and he is down amongst things that 
are bigger than he. His passions and his cir- 
cumstances, his desires, the elements in his na- 
ture and the objects in his world, stand all round 
him, and they are too big compared with him. 
He cannot see over them or see round them to 
get them into a plan; each must possess him in 
turn on its own account. His world and his self 
have plenty of material in them, but the material 
is "all anyhow." The world and the self are 
"unformed." 

"Little by little, as we grow up, we come to 
be more of a match for both. We grow taller, 
and get our heads above them and survey them, 
and understand the form that they should have. 
It is "not good form" to snatch other people's 
toys, or to scream when anything annoys us : it is 
"childish" to let a small fear stand in the way 
of a big purpose. Standards of life, and manners 
and conventions — even the rules of a game — are 
instances of ordering through organisation. A 
baby cannot play a game, either in the literal or 
in the wider sense. The ordinary duties and 
pleasures of our lives, and great passions and 



CHILDISHNESS 69 

revelations, all help us to grow up if we take them 
worthily. By their means we learn, and we create, 
the shape of life. 

II 

Now the difficulty is that we grow up unevenly. 
To the day of our death each of us in part is a 
child. 

To keep the rules and customs of a game, we 
said, was a piece of grown-upness as far as it 
went. We may make ourselves keep them, and 
yet have bits of our nature protesting all the time. 
We don't want to break rules, perhaps, but we 
may want to go against all good form by accusing 
the other side of breaking them, by carping and 
quarrelling, by audibly or visibly criticising the 
umpire. In refraining from doing any of these 
things, we are forcing into -shape impulses within 
us which are still untrained and unshapely. We 
have preserved that possibility of playing games, 
of having decent relationships on the playing- 
ground, which the child within us would break 
up, not realising what he destroys. 

We may keep rules by force in the wider field 
of manners and conventions. We may be civil 
when all the childishness in us is kicking and want- 
ing to be rude. Of course if the civility were no 
more than a disguise, — if we intended to give 
expression to our worst feelings, or even to do an 



70 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

injury, as soon and as publicly as we safely could, 
— then it would be u bad form," which is worse 
than no form at all. Yet "no form at all' is bad 
enough in any one above childish age. People 
give it finer names sometimes in their own case; 
they call it "straightforwardness" or "downright- 
ness" when they have given way to all their im- 
pulses and given free passage to all their careless 
words, and flung about unpleasant sayings and de- 
tracting opinions which are sure to hit and hurt 
somebody. They are as downright as thought- 
less little boys throwing stones about in the street. 
The genuine grown-up endeavour to be loyal if 
only to the outward forms of courtesy and con- 
sideration — this helps to keep safe the shapeliness 
and Tightness of civilised life; even though the 
little boy inside us should have to be held back 
by main force all the time. 

Sometimes it is not a matter of holding back, 
but rather of taking by the shoulder and pushing 
forward. The child within us hangs back and 
hinders us; it feels shy or frightened or awkward; 
it "doesn't like" to do something that is required. 
When the whole of us was a child, our childish 
fear or shyness paralysed the whole of us. But 
now the child is only part of us and the grown-up 
part can go on acting; so that the child often 
settles down presently, finding that no notice is 



CHILDISHNESS 71 

taken. This maintaining of decency, after all, is 
a surprisingly large part of grown-up life. We 
feel frightened and reluctant, but if we don't show 
it the company is not disturbed. We may be un- 
well, but after childhood we don't talk too much 
about our ailments and our symptoms. To the 
end of our lives we shall have impulses which are 
unshaped and untrained, which do not want to 
obey. Inside they will be disorderly, but if we 
can keep them in outward order the greater part 
of the situation is saved. We shall always need 
at times a certain effort and decision; a "putting 
away" of the childish things. 

Ill 

Sometimes it is our understanding rather than 
our will which needs to grow up. Let us consider 
a tangle in family relationship — the difficulty 
which one sometimes finds in getting on at home. 
Somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five, a girl 
at home may go through a time of real unhappi- 
ness and bewilderment. In such a period we feel 
"down amongst" things that stand round us and 
block our view. We can't see over them ; can't get 
the right form. We can't do right in other peo- 
ple's eyes, and they can't do right in our eyes. It 
may be a time of much friction and discomfort for 
all concerned, and of real misery for some. 



72 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

With the normal well-meaning family, it is 
growing up that cures this. By and by, gradually, 
if we are honestly doing our best, there comes a 
time when we begin to get our heads above the 
circumstances and the relationships, and are thus 
able to have a different attitude of comprehension. 
We can see over them, see how things are, and 
then we can make allowances. A small child looks 
up to his mother and supposes her to be perfect; 
he quarrels with his brothers and sisters when 
they are not perfect; but a grown person must 
make allowances if he is to live in a community 
at all. And here the childish habits may make it 
hardest at home. We learn to have a tolerant 
understanding, and mutual give and take, and 
mutual help and forgiveness, with friends of our 
own age, but we find it harder to practise these 
with brothers and sisters, and hardest of all with 
our parents. The childish belief that one's 
mother is an angel becomes the demand that she 
shall be an angel, and then turns to resentment and 
bitterness when one finds she is a human being, — 
bitterness greater than any we should feel for the 
lapses of an ordinary friend. When we were 
little, our mother was not angry with us for being 
imperfect creatures. She had the grownup atti- 
tude from the first; she could see over us and 
understand us, and help and forgive. There 



CHILDISHNESS 73 

comes a time when we must learn to be inwardly 
motherly, even towards our own mother. 

This may be a most difficult adjustment to 
make, especially if it has to be made without 
much help from change of outward circumstances. 
Temporary separation — going to college, for in- 
stance — may help. Taking a position often helps. 
Marriage would help, only for other reasons it 
ought not often to come so early. But it may 
be difficult in spite of any of these. When we 
are young we feel that our parents ought to 
manage it; they are older and more experienced; 
they ought to understand and to modify the rela- 
tionship, even when we can't. If they would be- 
have differently to us, we think we should behave 
well to them. Yet we must remember that of this 
particular stress they have little more experience 
than we have. Their experience, these many 
years, has consisted in being the parents of a little 
girl, and now they have to learn to be parents of 
a young woman. In this new business, they may 
be as much children as ourselves, and as much 
puzzled and hurt. We all have to learn to grow 
older together, and to be gentle with one another 
whilst we are doing it. 

IV 

We may take another example, of the need and 



74 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

the difficulty of growing up, from our experience 
of fussed-ness and obsession in general. When we 
are fussed, we are down amongst our circum- 
stances. Our world as a whole is not formed, not 
in shape, because some group of things is standing 
across our way all out of the pattern, using up our 
attention and blocking our view. We are losing 
control of them and of ourselves. They seem 
much bigger than they really are, because we are 
below them and they are shutting out the back- 
ground. It is the frequent losing of background, 
or the habitual working without a background, 
which characterises the person that we call child- 
ishly fussy. The person of concentrated mind 
gives equal attention to the objects he deals with, 
but he still sees the big landscape in which they 
take their place. The fussy person does not see 
the landscape. 

The business of putting away this childishness 
is certainly one that never comes to an end. Yet 
as we grow we can become saner and more wide- 
seeing in one region after another. Effort and 
decision can do something; the stirring up of self- 
respect; the inward insistence on keeping a "mind 
above the mind," and on identifying our self with 
the wider vision even when it is dim and waver- 
ing. Faithfulness to outward form will help here 
also; behaving as if we were sensible even when 



CHILDISHNESS 75 

we are not. We can call on such strength and 
sanity and good sense as we have, refuse at any 
rate to remain sitting down on the child's level. 
''Stand upon thy feet," said God to the prophet, 
"and I will speak unto thee." The course of ex- 
perience, again, does much, if we will use the 
experiences that come to us. The growth of large 
and stable interests does a very great deal, creat- 
ing a large world and a wide background for us. 
We are far less likely to care disproportionately 
about little things if we care greatly for big things. 
The religious person, a child towards God, should 
be the most fully grown up with regard to the 
world. 

V 

And the line where we still lose our sense of 
proportion we may take as the boundary of our 
dominion so far, a boundary which is to be pushed 
further. We find ourselves children just at the 
growing point. If we no longer felt childish any- 
where it would mean, not that we were fully 
grown-up, but that we had stopped growing. We 
feel ourselves childish and unformed, helpless 
among circumstances or among our own impulses, 
not when we are simply helpless and unresisting 
as a baby would be, but when the form is strug- 
gling to impose itself on the matter, half there 
and not wholly there. All this holds still of the 



76 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

last example that I shall take — that of a passionate 
and rebellious desire — such a passion as jealousy. 
It is common to say that a child is "self-cen- 
tered" by nature. The phrase is a bad one, since 
there is really no one centre in his desires; each 
impulse works from its own centre and gets what 
it can for itself. Growing up means a gradual 
creation, out of the many impulses, of a reasonable 
plan of life; and in good growing up that plan 
will be an element in a larger design — the common 
life of a group, or of a great society, or of the 
whole world. But because we never finish grow- 
ing up, because the form may be always becoming 
wider and richer and gathering up more of the 
matter, and yet will always find more to gather 
up, therefore at boundary and growing points, and 
coming up from lower levels, we shall find desires 
still unformed and unfriendly, which refuse to en- 
rich the design with themselves ; which cut across 
it, hurting and hindering our other purposes, hurt- 
ing ourselves as much as they hurt other people; 
striving on their own account for their own iso- 
lated end; unable to reach it and unable to change 
it; starving themselves for lack of fulfilment, and 
willing to starve others. Such a passion is jealousy; 
the bitter childishness which may take us by the 
throat even far on in our growth, even when we 
are old. 



CHILDISHNESS 77 

The person who has tried to conquer jealousy 
knows the fundamental effort of the process of 
growing up. He has engaged in full conscious- 
ness in that struggle which stays mostly below the 
threshold of consciousness; the deadly embrace of 
the deepest elements in himself, of a form and 
matter which should be lovers and cannot be 
friends. He will have experience enough, if he 
stands up to it. He must do what he can to grow 
in every part; to get a wider world and stronger 
interests that may draw the balance away from 
this obsession. Faithfulness to the outward form, 
here once more, is a great matter. If we cannot 
help hatred and bitterness inside, we have done 
much if we can observe decency and keep them 
to ourselves. It may easily be that the struggle 
never will come to an end of itself. It may have 
to go on until it is solved, independently of our 
direct effort, in the natural course of life. Mean- 
while all we can do is to keep our head up; to 
take every means to help, and then, having done 
all, just to stand; or at any rate to keep on getting 
up again when we have slipped down. 

VI 

We have spent much time in developing a text 
which perhaps was hardly more than a chance 
illustration in St. Paul's mind, and we may gain 



78 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

by looking back at his context before we end. The 
preceding chapter treats of social organisation, 
good form in a society. You are to fit into the 
design, St. Paul says — understand that hands and 
feet and brain of one body are not each to fight 
for its own good, but each to help the rest in its 
own manner. Let every one desire to have the 
great gifts, certainly, but be reasonable and recog- 
nise that everybody can't do everything. But be- 
sides this reasonableness, "I show unto you a still 
more excellent way." And then follows the great 
description of the one organising factor which, 
from childhood to old age, on earth and in heaven, 
"never faileth." In the small child who restrains 
his noise because his mother is tired; in the mother 
who suffers long and is kind; in the boy who plays 
the game and keeps his manners, and "does not 
behave himself unseemly"; in the woman who is 
not worried and not provoked, because she is liv- 
ing in a bigger life than her own; in the man who 
fails in his endeavour and yet "envieth not"; in 
all these Love is grown-up. 

I have spoken of growing up as meaning an 
increase in height, a power of surveying and grasp- 
ing our world, seeing its shape and mastering it. 
To Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century 
there came a glimpse of the appearance which we, 
and our world, and everything about us might 



CHILDISHNESS 79 

have for one who could see all over it. "The 
Lord shewed me a little thing, the quantity of a 
hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as me 
seemed; and it was as round as a ball. I looked 
thereon with the eye of my understanding, and 
thought, 'What may this be ?' and it was answered 
generally thus: 'It is all that is made/ I mar- 
velled how it might last; for methought it might 
suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And 
I was answered in my understanding: 'It lasteth, 
and ever shall: for God loveth it. And so hath 
all thing being by the love of God.' " 



VII 
POWERS OF DARKNESS 

"We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against 
principalities, against powers, against the world-lords of 
this darkness, against spiritual beings of evil in the sky 
above us; so take to yourselves the panoply of God." — 
Ephesians vi. 12 (T. H. Glover's translation). 

I 

St. Paul was writing to people for whom the 
universe was full of spiritual beings of all kinds, 
with all manner of titles — Princes and Powers, 
Elements and Rulers — beings for the most part 
hostile to man. Through life and death they 
were watching to entrap and destroy the soul. 
Paul does not -oppose this conception; rather he 
assumes it; but he encourages his readers to be- 
lieve that in the strength of their Leader and 
Helper they can overcome all the hosts of dark- 
ness. 

We are far off now from those crowded East- 
ern towns of the first century, with their confused 
heterogeneous population, and their queer mixed 
thought gathered from the thought of every race. 

80 



POWERS OF DARKNESS 81 

Perhaps none of us believe just as the readers of 
that letter believed, in the multitude of super- 
natural beings — persons embodying forces of evil. 
But the forces of evil are real enough still, and 
it may be worth our while to look at some of the 
things that Paul said about them for the help of 
his various churches. 

For even if we do not believe in personal 
demons, still it may be useful to personify de- 
liberately. To give a name to a spiritual force — 
to image it concretely as an enemy or friend — 
this gives it a vividness and solidity which may 
make it all the easier to deal with. The forces 
of evil may be called Principalities or Thrones 
or Dominions, or by any other name we choose. 
They are the spirits of What Should Not Be. 

Paul speaks, as to his audience it was natural 
to speak, of "evil spirits in the sky above us"; 
and elsewhere in a similar connection he speaks of 
"things in the sky, and things on earth, and things 
under the earth." These spirits live in this place 
or that place ; they have local habitations as well 
as names. We can fit this also into our allegory, 
for the spirits of What Should Not Be will live, 
presumably, in the place where anything is wrong. 
The appropriate demons will be found on earth 
in dirty houses, and under the earth in faulty 
drains; they will live in schoolrooms where 
children are bullied, and in mills where low wages 



82 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

are paid, and in places where people quarrel. A 
woman with a scrubbing-brush will be cleaning 
devils out of the room — yet Ruskin said that a 
woman, "by her office, and place, ... is pro- 
tected from all danger and temptation. The man, 
in his rough work in open world, must encounter 
all peril and trial . . . But he guards the 
woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by 
her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter 
no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or 
offence." It is a rare house, surely, into which the 
devil cannot enter; and he does not often wait to 
be asked in. 

Devils live in the places that we live in, 
wherever the forms or the conditions of life are 
wrong. It is true, no doubt, that they can only 
cross the threshold of the house along with us — 
they need our companionship. They would not 
live in an empty house however insanitary, but 
they come to live there when we come to live 
there. This makes it a little difficult for our 
parable to follow the ancient picture in having 
evil spirits u in the sky." The clean empty sky, 
without any human beings in it, might seem to be 
a place that would also be empty of our accom- 
panying adversaries. Still, if there are any in- 
telligent beings living on other stars or other 
planets besides our earth, certainly the adversaries 
will be living there too. And if at the death of 



POWERS OF DARKNESS 83 

the body our own souls set out on a journey 
through space, as so many of Paul's readers be- 
lieved, it is true that their spiritual enemies would 
not be left behind on earth. We may see a good 
deal of truth in that vision of "things in the sky"; 
the vision of the presence of peril and the need 
of valour up to the very end of the journey — of 
shadowy giant figures rising round the soul even 
in its passage beyond the stars. 

Meanwhile, we see the demons living alongside 
of us, in definite places, where there is any con- 
crete thing that should not be. We meet them 
with strength of body and mind; with the whole 
armour of God; with scrubbing-brushes and 
spades and the opening of windows; with books 
and music and handwork lessons ; with a new scale 
of wages; with prayer and self-sacrifice; with 
honest acts and clean words. In every good deed 
we are conquering some piece of territory, to 
hand it over to our Master. 

II 

Sometimes it may be hard to say exactly what 
that territory is. A spiritual being may be won- 
derfully skilful in creating illusions : he uses look- 
ing-glasses as we use them on the stage for ghosts 
and magic. In the classroom sometimes a crowd 
of demons seem to be coming and going amongst 
the children; yet we may suspect that most of 



84 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

them are really lodging inside our own body, in 
tired brain-cells and irritable nerves. Sometimes 
such a difficulty may go on for years. We pity 
ourselves because wherever we live our neighbours 
seem to follow the same custom of doing us in- 
juries and disregarding our feelings. Or we re- 
flect that we have had a hard life because there 
has always been somebody — a different person at 
different periods of our life, but always somebody 
— who was an oppression to us, from whose 
presence we shrank, and the thought of whom in 
absence was a shadow over our other thoughts. 
Such uniform ill-luck seems to suggest that there 
may be a spirit inside us which has had something 
to do with it. 

"This person and that person, and then these 
other people, have behaved wrongly towards me." 
This is our natural and impulsive description of 
the misfortunes of our lives. Then with the help 
of our guardian angels of reflection and criticism 
and a sense of humour, we may arrive at asking, 
"Was it really just these persons themselves? or 
is it the Spirit of irritability, or jealousy, or fear, 
with his foothold in my own heart, who gathered 
them up in his hands to tease me with them? If 
these persons had not been there, would he not 
easily enough have found others for his instru- 
ments? Have I been wrestling against flesh and 
blood, or against Principalities and Powers?" 



POWERS OF DARKNESS 85 

If one has a special and enduring evil spirit of 
one's own, it is helpful by such reflection or by 
other means to come to know him. We may learn 
then, at any rate, that we must reckon with him 
in our life. We may go on changing our circum- 
stances and our neighbours, but this neighbour is 
likely to stay with us through many changes. We 
shall have to reckon with him, and deal with him, 
and bear with him. He may leave us some day, 
when we are older, or he may not. He is of a 
constant nature, and very long-lived; perhaps 
immortal. 

Ill 

When a Power is at once so constant and so 
elusive, the business of fighting him becomes very 
interesting but also extraordinarily difficult. He 
has not only the gift of illusion but the gift of 
standing in two places at once, and we find some- 
times that while we thought we were fighting 
against him we were also fighting vehemently on 
his side. You remember William James's descrip- 
tion of the evil of unnecessary strain and the need 
of relaxing one's mental muscles, and how he goes 
on to say, "Even now I fear that some one of my 
hearers may be making an undying resolve to be- 
come strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the 
remainder of her life." 1 We fight fussily against 

1 Talks on Psychology and Life's Ideals, p. 227. 



86 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

our own fussiness, and crossly against our own ill- 
temper. We employ Satan to cast out Satan, and 
he is an unprofitable servant. 

In the outer world also the Powers have a way 
of standing in double ranks, each facing his own 
image, so that the most valiant opponent if he 
takes his place hastily may find himself promoting 
his enemy's cause. A bracing teacher tries to cure 
a child of his timidity, and finds the timidity in- 
crease as a result of the treatment. In a news- 
paper correspondence, one man will write rudely 
to rebuke another for rudeness, and then each 
day will bring a new hail of insults from both 
sides. We try to fight poverty with free alms- 
giving, and homelessness with free shelters, and 
we find that poverty and homelessness increase. 
In every battle of our lives, in every quarrel in 
our business or profession, in politics, in every 
disagreement with our friends or with our ene- 
mies, we learn the elusiveness of the spirit of evil, 
and his skill in putting himself behind us when 
we thought we were attacking him. He disguises 
himself and he disguises us, so that our own eyes 
are deceived. We and he are clothed all over 
with right sentiments and good intentions. "Satan 
fashioneth himself into an angel of light. It is 
no great thing, therefore, if his ministers also 
fashion themselves as ministers of righteousness, 
whose end shall be according to their works." 



POWERS OF DARKNESS 87 

IV 

It is not easy to fight with principalities and 
powers. A bishop has written of the European 
war: "What we are fighting — and the sooner we 
all recognise it the better — is a system and spirit 
which mean death to every nobler trait of hu- 
manity, and the destruction of all that we value 
as Christians, let alone as citizens of a free coun- 
try. Don't let us lose sight of this. We are up 
against the forces of evil and a spirit loosed from 
Hell." We have to fight the devil where we see 
him, with any weapons we can find; yet it is ter- 
ribly hard to be sure how much harm our bayonets 
are doing him. Poor flesh and blood wrestles 
against flesh and blood, and sometimes the spirit- 
ual beings of evil sit safe in the sky above us, and 
gather profit whichever side wins. 

A woman said to me at the beginning of the 
war, "Of course I'm not so faithless as to doubt 
that we shall win; I have religion enough for 
that." It seems to commit one to saying that the 
conqueror has always been in the right; but pass 
that. If we win — when we win — shall we manage 
to prevent the world-lords of this darkness from 
recording also a substantial victory of their own? 
We may be entering, for instance, on a long term 
of years in which much will be lost that we have 
painfully gained in the past; a time when the 



88 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

poor will suffer more and lack more; when the 
position of wage-earners will be weakened; when 
the care of public health will slip back; when the 
children in elementary schools will have less to 
eat; when schools will be cramped and stuffy and 
ill-furnished, and classes large, and the half-time 
age will begin even earlier. Any or all of these 
things may happen; one fears that some of them 
will happen. It is not absolutely necessary. If 
the war made us a really heroic nation, we might 
win even this battle; we might say that not one 
of us would enjoy an unnecessary comfort at the 
expense of lowering the care of children and the 
minimum standard of life. But I do not at present 
see much likelihood of our doing so. I fear that 
we of this generation are to enter a darker age 
than the one we were born in. 

"The darkness deepens : Lord, with me abide." 
The darkness is most real; "over all the earth 
until the ninth hour." Again and again in the 
world's history our Master is crucified and cast 
out, and it is three days before anyone finds that 
he is alive after all. Meanwhile, what home or 
shelter can we give him? 

"Where a true woman is, there is home." 
Where a true man is, there is shelter. Where a 
true teacher is, there is civilisation. In our homes 
and our schools, shall we be able to keep a light 



POWERS OF DARKNESS 89 

burning? to bring light to them that sit in dark- 
ness, even though the darkness grows thicker and 
thicker? or shall we relapse into walking "accord- 
ing to the course of this world, according to the 
prince of the power of the air"? In the midst 
of that prince's dominion, we may offer a refuge 
and a citadel, in small human lives, for the per- 
secuted God. 

V 

Or suppose it is an inward battle. Suppose 
that the power of the air seems to rule our own 
lives and our own hearts; that we are fighting in 
vain against our own cowardice, or egoism, or 
idleness, or ill-temper, and proving ourselves the 
slaves of these demons every day. If we are 
still lighting, then even in this defeat we are 
keeping sure and safe an inner fortress for our 
Master; the fortress of our will and desire and 
our refusal to make truce. 

St. Paul certainly believes that we shall be able 
in the end to do much more than this. A person 
who is possessed by this dweller in the innermost 
will find, he says, that the evil beings cannot really 
stand against him at all. This spirit is "far above 
all principality, and power, and might, and do- 
minion, and every name that is named." He 
paints the normal life of a Christian as a series 
of battles indeed, but also as a series of victories. 



90 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

It is possible, he says, to live well; possible, not 
to get away from Satan, but to beat down Satan 
under our feet in the strength of God. "That 
ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and 
what the riches of the glory of his inheritance 
in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness 
of his power.' 1 "Giving thanks unto the Father, 
which hath made us meet to be partakers of the 
inheritance of the saints in light: who hath de- 
livered us from the power of darkness, and hath 
translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son." 
This is the glory which we hope will be ful- 
filled, and which we believe is fulfilling itself in 
many human lives. Meanwhile, however far off 
from it at times we and the world seem to be, 
however immovably the power of darkness seems 
to occupy our territory, still so long as the inner 
citadel still resists, and the inner light is not ex- 
tinguished, God is unconquered and we are his 
soldiers. To an individual or a nation that is 
still endeavouring, however feebly, to live well, 
the besieging demons make in this respect no 
difference at all. A soldier besieged with his 
General may live closer to him than he ever did 
before. "Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor 
principalities, nor powers, shall be able to sepa- 
rate us from the love of God." 



VIII 
WITNESSES 

"So great a cloud of witnesses." — Hebrews xii. 1. 

The writer to the Hebrews had a commemora- 
tion of all witnessings, all loyalties and martyr- 
doms, since the beginning of the world. (The 
word translated "witness" is the same that we 
have taken over from the Greek as "martyr.") 
We may blend our remembering with his. Let 
us commemorate deeds and words and thoughts 
that have lit up this shadow and all shadows, that 
burn against the darkness of the present and the 
past, that bear witness to the glory that can be 
reached by human spirits 

We wish to remember and give thanks for all 
the small unnoticed shinings as well as the great 
ones, and the deeds of small men — even of men 
who in much of their life may have been small- 
minded and small-souled — as well as the deeds of 
great heroes and saints. Consistently splendid 
persons and splendid lives are few, but the touches 
of splendour in ordinary lives are not few. In 

91 



92 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

these last years a great strain has been put pub- 
licly on many thousands of ordinary persons, and 
the result, it has been said, is that a level of hero- 
ism which we thought was a sharp and lonely 
peak has shown itself as a great table-land. Thou- 
sands of ordinary persons are heroic — thousands 
bear witness, in loyalty or generosity or patience 
or forbearance, to what an ordinary person may 
achieve. But often we did not see it. We are 
too close, and we are inattentive; magnificence, 
like a picture, is easiest to see from a certain dis- 
tance, and we may need to be prompted before 
we even look at it. Sometimes we see it first from 
a distance, and are confused when we see it close. 
We hear of a splendid deed, and then, meeting 
the doer, we find that he is in most ways an or- 
dinary man and in many ways a faulty or com- 
monplace man. We are very blind then if we 
drop our admiration, and fail to see the treasure 
because an earthen vessel holds it. 

If we had enough of the divine vision, we 
should see and worship that treasure wherever 
it was found. We help our imagination by pic- 
turing it as it has appeared in a special place, 
and many of us probably were taught in childhood 
to use one picture above all — to worship and give 
thanks for the splendour of one Person, and to 
sum up all sacrifice and endurance in "the Cross 



WITNESSES 93 

of Jesus." For other children, other pictures will 
have been added to this, and they will have been 
taught to reverence "the saints." But we need 
in the end more than reverence for saints; we 
need reverence for sainthood wherever it occurs; 
even where it is struggling in the same heart as 
the worst sins; even when it fails after an hour. 
The Captain of our salvation came not to block 
the rest of the army from our eyes, but to open 
our eyes to them. 

But, says some one, we can only reverence what 
is perfect. Let it be so; but we have poor eyes 
if we see perfection only when it has a perfect 
setting. Is not the same divine spirit present 
and shining in the common soldier who in the 
midst of faults, for one hour only, is clinging to 
some loyalty? St. Paul saw the perfect spirit in 
the imperfect hearts of himself and his fellow 
Christians, and he made his own picture of it. 
"Not we live," he said, "but Christ liveth in us." 
"The Son of God goes forth to war," not in one 
man's body only but in millions, and for a million 
years. 

The army wears all uniforms and is spread all 
over the world. If our mind will hold fast to 
this, we have a right to help another side of our 
vision by nearer and warmer means. We may 
allow ourselves and teach ourselves still to recog- 



94 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

nise and personify the army in those members 
who are most nearly and warmly "our sort." To 
each person, given his special temperament and 
experience, certain figures are the most attractive 
and inspiring, and he may take these as his special 
picture of the whole. It may be an imaginary 
picture — it is quite possible for inspiration to come 
through a novel or a play. Or we may find the 
light shining first through some great historical 
figure, a saint or hero of the past or of our own 
day, who ennobled the world that he passed 
through : 

"He has been our fellow, the morning of our days; 
Us he chose for comrades, and this way went." 

Apart from great leaders, one recognition is 
blessedly easiest in youth — to see the glory in 
persons that we know: our mothers, our friends, 
our lovers and our beloved. If love and hero- 
worship grow less as we grow older, it is not that 
we grow clearer-sighted. In this the young have 
often a special vision of the truth. 

These are captains of our salvation, who have 
opened the door of heaven to us; for surely we 
are looking into heaven if there is suddenly lit 
up for us the goodly fellowship of the prophets 
and the noble army of martyrs. And these, or 
their fellow-soldiers and ours, are still making 
up that fellowship and that army. I have found 



WITNESSES 95 

that it sometimes gives a new reality to hymns 
and prayers if one joins in them with this picture 
in mind; calling to mind deliberately such part 
of the army as appeals to us most. 

When we join in the prayer for the whole army, 
we are delivered from our own selfishness. Our 
own difficulties seem so much less important when 
we have this landscape before us. We remain 
chiefly as givers of thanks, for that redemption 
of the world in man's spirit to which these men 
bear witness. And yet, transfigured, our own 
difficulties and our own business do remain. What 
we do with them becomes much more important 
because these persons have lived and are living. 

"I must do this because such and such persons 
would do it." "I cannot do that because they 
would not." What exactly is the argument here? 
One form of it is, "I must do this and not that 
because I must be like them. I must become such 
another as they are." A child may often take 
that standpoint, and it is natural and right that 
he should. The boy in the morning of his life 
hopes to become before its evening what his 
knights and heroes have been. But as one grows 
older and fails more, perhaps the impulse, though 
no less binding, is apt to take a simpler and 
humbler form. We say not, "I must be like those 
persons," but only "I must be on their side." 



96 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

"Are we worthy of what the soldiers are do- 
ing for us?" What can we answer but "There 
is no worth in us"? How can we be worthy of 
this part or of any other part of the great army? 
How can we be worthy of the million years of 
consecration? of the divinity in man which has 
worked since the beginning of the world? Our 
worthiness falls to the ground. There remains 
just this : that nothing is worth while on earth 
unless we are on their side: unless in our own 
little place with our feeble weapons we are the 
least of fighters in that army. The splendour of 
man constraineth us. 

In our dealings to-day and to-morrow and next 
day with our small trials and our great weaknesses, 
we are to be of this fellowship. We, unworthy, 
drink in our tiny measure of the cup that these 
drink of. What should we do if we had nothing 
to give or to dare or to endure? if no race were 
set before us? What should we do in these days, 
which have only opened our eyes more widely to 
what was always true? "Seeing we are com- 
passed about with so great a cloud of martyrs, 
let us run with patience" . . . 

"Out under moon and stars 

And shafts of the urgent sun, 
Whose face on prison bars 
And mountain heads is one, 
Our march is everlasting till Time's march be done." 



IX 
THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD 

"My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven 
and earth. . . . The Lord shall keep thy going out 
and thy coming in." — Psalm cxxi. 

"Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe." — Psalm cxix. 
117. 

"I will lay me down in peace and sleep: for thou, 
Lord, only makest me dwell in safety." — Psalm iv. 8. 



We could find a hundred such texts in the Bible, 
and many more in religious writings of other 
lands and other days. To appropriate them to 
ourselves, we need not assume any miracles worked 
on our behalf, nor need we even do more than 
give the name of God to that spirit of law and 
faithfulness in Nature, and wise thoughts and 
brave deeds in conscious beings, which indeed has 
made the solidity of heaven and earth. We lie 
down at night protected by walls and roof. How 
many ages, of how many skilful hands and pa- 
tient minds, were needed before men learnt to 

97 



98 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

build them. We lie down defended by the laws 
and their ministers, and by the honest and orderly 
customs of our country. Behind these lies a his- 
tory which, through all distraction of faults and 
errors, is worthy to be called the history of a 
divine work. We lie down expecting food next 
day, with the ploughed field and the sowing and 
reaping behind it. Man and beast and the earth 
have worked together, and the Lord in them has 
built the house of our safety. 

We go out in the morning under the same de- 
fence. The laws of Nature work with us if we 
will work with them, and will never fail us. Men 
long dead co-operate with us through customs and 
institutions and the sound learning which they 
have handed on. Living inventors that we never 
heard of, and physicians on the other side of 
the world, protect our bodies against dangers of 
which we seldom need to think. Our country's 
education and civilisation defend us. Errors and 
vices that might have been pressing temptations 
to some ancestor never strike us with temptation 
at all; so protected are we by a higher public 
opinion and cleanly ways around us. Difficulties 
with our neighbours that might have led to mur- 
der scarcely appear as difficulties, so much a matter 
of course do we find the customary means of solu- 
tion that society has established for us. "Mere 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD 99 

machinery," we sometimes call these solutions. 
The Lord surely is in the machine. 

And this defending God is within us as well as 
outside us. We are upheld by every year of our 
past childhood in a Christian home; by every good 
habit and good principle instilled into us ; by every 
fine person we have met, and every good book 
we have read, and every beautiful thing that we 
have loved, since all these in turn have added 
their share to the defences in our character. We 
are upheld by all gifts of Nature that we re- 
ceived before we came into the world, and by 
all the training they have received since. Finally 
and chiefly, we are upheld by our present as well 
as our past; by that light and strength of reason, 
conscience, faithfulness, to which specially we have 
learnt to give the name of God dwelling in us. 

II 

We have spoken already, as the Psalmists 
spoke, of more than one kind of safety. We have 
protection for our body and for our mind, pro- 
tection against suffering wrong and against doing 
wrong. Let us look specially now at the protec- 
tion against doing wrong — the forces that keep 
us safe in the right way. 

It is interesting to notice first that it seems 
possible for many people to use the defence piece- 



100 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

meal. They turn on one or two of the side lights, 
not the central light; have "local" consciences and 
understandings. A man may have a professional 
conscience much superior to his private conscience ; 
may put much more honour and courage and care 
into his work as an artist or a statesman than into 
his relations as husband or father or son. Or he 
may be a good husband and father and a bad 
employer; or a scrupulous friend and an un- 
scrupulous man of business. Most of us indeed 
let our lives fall into separate compartments, some 
compartments managed better than others and 
some worse. If a good and careful public servant 
is a" bad husband, or a good daughter is a care-, 
less teacher, we have no right to say that the 
goodness in the one compartment is not genuine. 
Every honourable purpose, however limited, and 
every sound interest or ideal upholds that part 
of life which it concerns, and may carry its strength 
some day beyond the limits of that part. If it is 
the Lord only who keeps us safe, then whatever 
keeps even a part of us safe, in whatever unex- 
pected form it comes, must in so far partake of 
divinity. 

We must never despise the side lights and the 
local consciences, if only because they supply so 
much of the actual day-by-day strength and guid- 
ance even in persons who have a more central 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD 101 

light as well. But the presence of a more cen- 
tral light adds a very great deal to the general 
trustworthiness of our lives and to their promise 
of growth. The "man that hath principle," in 
Cromwell's phrase, is the man with some ideal of 
life as a whole, however imperfect, and some pur- 
pose about it, however unfinished. Such a man 
is by no means the only one to give valuable gifts 
to the world, and yet you remember that Crom- 
well wanted such men in his army, rather than 
the most brilliant soldier who started only with an 
ideal of soldiering as such. The man "that hath 
principle" does not necessarily put his principle 
into words. He may even dislike and rebel against 
any form of words that he has happened to meet. 
Or it may be only at the end of his life that he 
can describe the lines on which he has worked, 
and his description then may be quite inadequate. 
And yet there has been a line. His life has been 
"straight," not merely from convention, but from 
an inner light and an inner spring to which he 
has more or less been faithful. Something at 
the centre of his will has held him up, and he has 
been safe — safe for all his leaders to trust and all 
his comrades to lean on. 

Let us take this then as typical — the light and 
strength of a general reason and conscience and 
faithfulness rather than the more erratic and ec- 



102 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

centric instances of a professional conscience only 
or a family conscience only. The person whom 
we feel it safe to lean on has not only special pur- 
poses but some general purpose underneath them. 
He wishes and makes some effort to do rightly 
in all the parts of the life he has to live, even in 
the parts that are not easy and not interesting and 
not congenial. He may fail very often, but we 
can trust him to try. 

I do not know that he could ever trust him- 
self. Which of us could venture to say that we 
answered to that description? Yet, though we 
would not trust ourselves, how shall we not trust 
that which we have found and tested? None of 
us, perhaps, can be proud of ourselves, yet nearly 
all of us have had the blessed fortune of good 
parents and good friends, and have had good seed 
planted in us which we did not sow. Is it not true, 
then, that nearly all of us from time to time have 
formed some such purpose as I have described, 
and have tried a little to carry it out? Ever 
since we were little children in a good home we 
have truly wished, now and then at any rate, to 
be good children. When we thus wished and 
when we thus tried, did we not in actual expe- 
rience find a strength that upheld us and a house 
of defence? and do we not in actual experience 
still find it? 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD 103 

This God, within us and around us, is our 
defence upon our right hand if we choose to fight 
upon his side. Inside or outside, of course (the 
alternative is largely a matter of words), he is 
anything but a defence if we choose to fight against 
him. But if we enlist, even for an hour, on the 
side of the good life, we are in touch with a 
source of strength which upheld the first conscious 
being who ever tried to do better, which has up- 
held every hero and martyr since; the spirit in 
man which through the ages has saved humanity 
— our help in ages past and our hope for years 
to come. 

Ill 

In whatever terms we explain or describe it, 
this strength is there for our use. We have as 
much claim to choose to be on the right side, and 
then as much right of access to the forces on that 
side, as any one who has ever lived. We, as much 
as any early Christian, can live here and now in 
the strength of the Lord. We may feel keenly 
enough that we have no strength inside us when 
we begin ; that we have scarcely any power which 
is independent of our choice of side. This is a 
very old experience, and it was said long ago that 
it is "to them that have no might" he increaseth 
strength; "the daily strength, to none that ask 
denied." 



104 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

We sometimes fail to use this strength because 
we ignore the fact that it is there. In a book 
written by a doctor I read lately an account of 
a nervous patient who was tormented by his re- 
current yielding to a temptation. "Do you pray 
about it?" asked the doctor. "Yes Indeed," said 
the patient, "I pray for hours at a time; I pray 
till I am exhausted, and then immediately I fall 
again." "But," said the doctor, "you need only 
ask once. When you have asked once, then you 
have the strength, and you need only give thanks 
for it and think no more of the matter." I have 
since tried this plan, and have found that in cer- 
tain difficulties it has an almost magical effect. 
The advice has good grounds, whether we think 
of it as based on theology or psychology or both. 

A connected difficulty in prayer, I have found, 
is that we imagine we cannot avail ourselves of 
the source of strength until we feel it. We seem 
to be trying to break through the wall of our 
own weakness and dryness and stupidity, and to 
be unable, until we can break through, to reach the 
power to which we appeal. But in theology and 
psychology alike the idea is wrong. There is no 
breaking-through to be done first — God is on this 
side of the wall. Where there is a soul with the 
feeblest desire for right, there, in that exact spot, 
God is. 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD 105 

I used to think it most unfair, when I was a 
child, that we should be told to thank God when 
we went right and to blame ourselves when we 
went wrong. Later, we find that these phrases 
express a real and deep-seated experience, though 
it may be difficult to put it into other words. Per- 
haps it is that when we are going wrong we are 
separate and single, set up against other beings, 
because we have become at odds with the spiritual 
purpose which works in us and in them. In this 
position, anything in me is "mine" in the way 
of hot private ownership. But when we are trying 
to do right we are in line with that great purpose 
and drawing on its strength, and we feel that this 
strength is not merely "mine" but accessible to 
everyone, and that we and all others would be 
empty vessels without it. We are cowards trying 
to be brave, and we pray, "Eternal Courage, 
strengthen us." That spirit which has upheld 
saints and martyrs is to uphold us in our little 
trial — that mind is to be in us which was also 
in Christ Jesus. This is not my mind or my spirit 
in the sense in which my cowardice or wilfulness 
or caprice was "mine." Yet in another sense it 
is far more mine than these were, being that for 
which I was made. 

IV 

And still we fail. Since early childhood we 



106 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

have prayed and tried, and yet things go wrong 
and we go wrong. In what sense, (then, can we 
really lie down in peace? In any sense, is the 
available grace sufficient for us? 

It is a very real difficulty. The strength of the 
Lord, it seems, protects us from suffering wrong 
— protects us very often, but not always. It pro- 
tects us from doing wrong — very often, but not 
always. How is it, in face of these apparent 
facts, that every form of religion is still bound 
up with the thought of an absolute liberation and 
perfect safety? 

It is a safety, the religious person claims, which 
is not postponed till after our death but can be 
gained at any moment, here and now. 

"Let me to Thy bosom fly, 

Wihile the nearer waters roll, 
While the tempest still is high." 

I have seen this described as a cowardly ut- 
terance. It is Charles Wesley's hymn, and the 
Wesleys were not apt to avoid storms, nor did 
their religious position help to keep them out of 
storms. A person of very keen and individual 
devoutness in any age is likely to be led into storms 
rather than out of them. A Mohammedan legend 
relates that the disciples of Jesus wished to build 
him a house, and he was to choose the site. He 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD 107 

pointed to the wildest waves on the lake, and 
said, "Build my house there." 

The safety which Charles Wesley looked for 
had little to do with defence against suffering 
wrong. It probably had a good deal more con- 
nection in his mind with defence against doing 
wrong, because he seems to have believed in the 
possibility of individual perfection. "Take away 
the power of sinning," he wrote in another hymn. 
But surely there was more even than that in his 
experience of safety. His brother at any rate, and 
others from the beginning of religious history, 
have found peace in the Lord, whilst yet believ- 
ing that they were frail human beings and would 
never be able or be enabled wholly to avoid sin. 

Is it something like this : that we find rest for 
our hearts by throwing them on to the side of 
all that is good or great, heroic or beautiful, in 
the universe? It is not that we claim or hope to 
be great or heroic or beautiful, to be permanently 
sinless any more than to be permanently unhurt. 
But all in our self that we have power over we 
put now on that side, at that service. And in this, 
here and now, we have salvation. 

We do not claim or hope to be great. We 
hardly claim or hope to be good, or at any rate 
we claim it in one of its senses only. "Is this a 
good child?" a new teacher may occasionally ask, 



108 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

and the former teacher answers with regard to 
the child's habitual success in obedience and dili- 
gence and good temper. All that we can say of 
ourselves, if goodness is used in this sense, is that 
we will try once more to be better than we have 
been. But there is another sense, in which a baby 
comes after a conflict to say, "Bobby is good 
now." This we can say, and this, in the teaching 
of every great religion, is the essential. For the 
examiner or the judge, this change in the child 
may be a small matter; for the mother it is a 
great one. They are friends again; details may 
still go wrong, but all is well at heart because love 
is healed between them. This is Love's test: are 
we good now? friends now? And we have long 
been taught that it is by studying human love that 
we obtain our clearest knowledge of the spirit of 
good in the universe. 

This parting of our will from the past and 
future weakness in us, throwing ourself on to 
the side of the best in our self and in the world, 
is something which appears fully and clearly only 
in human beings, yet which seems to have begin- 
nings in the higher domestic animals. A stone or 
a plant cannot choose sides at all. An animal can 
do so as regards the outside world. Can he do 
so as regards himself? Can he recognise a better 
and a worse that are both contained within him, 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD 109 

and throw himself on the side of the better? Not 
with any clearness, certainly, yet lovers of dogs 
may claim that a dog in a dim way may have real 
repentance; that he may come to make friends 
with an offended master as a baby comes to make 
friends after wrong-doing. Probably we have no 
right to draw a hard line to exclude any creature 
that can feel love. Full and clear repentance 
would involve clear vision that what we have been 
doing is a poor thing, and that we turn from it 
to something greater; but for the baby we can 
hardly claim a vision so precise as this. One can- 
not imagine that he turns his eyes exactly on the 
action over which he and Mother fell out, and 
judges that Mother was right and he was wrong. 
Repentance with him is rather a turning from one 
whole world to another whole world. He has 
found that the world he chose was poor and un- 
satisfying, and without being able to analyse all 
his reasons he runs back to the other world which 
contains Mother. In the fuller repentance of 
our later days we understand more clearly, but 
there is not much difference in this fundamental 
turning; the division and rebirth of the self; the 
coming back of the will to the deeper love. If 
we admit this in the little child, we can hardly 
deny it altogether in the dog who turns from the 
sullenness and snappishness in himself towards the 



110 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

world which contains the love of his master. And 
if even a dog can thus have some experience of 
repentance, he will have following on it some ex- 
perience of salvation. His heart can rest in his 
lord — in the divinity which he can see plainest. 



We have been calling up a very old doctrine : 
"Repent, and be saved." Salvation has had other 
meanings, and we need not quarrel over the use 
of words, but this seems to be its central mean- 
ing of all. Repentance and forgiveness need have 
nothing to do with escape from any legal punish- 
ment, whether inflicted by man or by a govern- 
ment higher than man's. Punishment may or may 
not follow, but repentance in itself involves wil- 
lingness to be punished and is consistent with de- 
sire to be punished. Repentance desires not 
escape from punishment, but the healing of love. 
"Turn, and you are saved" — not safe from the 
suffering of wrong, not safe for ever even from 
doing wrong, but safe now from being wrong; 
safe in fellowship with all that is good; in the 
peace of the Lord. 

This would be much even if "Safe now" meant 
limitation to a certain time. This day or this 
hour would be saved, consecrated, lived in friend- 
ship with that which is perfect, even though other 



THE STRENGTH OF THE LORD 111 

days were lost. It would be much even if it were 
limited to one part of ourself. A man repents 
of one kind of sin and overlooks another, as we 
all do ; then one part of his self would be redeemed 
whilst another part was still "in the flesh." But 
the matter is deeper and more complex. In the 
moment of true repentance, by the formal turn- 
ing of our will, we throw upon the right side 
everything over which we have power. We offer 
up the future and the past, and our whole self 
known or unknown. And this is not annulled 
by the passing of the moment. Our common 
philosophy of time falls us here — we have dipped 
beneath time into eternity. "This is life eternal, 
that they should know thee." 

This, and only this, is the inmost house of the 
strength of the Lord, whose door always stands 
open; our Eternal Home even while troubles last 
through the ages. Or, in the other metaphor, this 
is to put ourselves in line with the divine life which 
flows round us and through us; to make its de- 
sires our own. "Let me to Thy bosom fly," to 
hide my heart in the heart of God. 



X 

THE DESIRE FOR EXPERIENCE 

"He asked life of thee."— Psalm xxi. 4. 



The desire to live, to know, to experience, runs 
for many persons all through their years, and 
runs through the earlier years for nearly all. 
From the baby crawling across the floor, through 
the boy climbing over a wall, up to clearest con- 
sciousness in the youth on the threshold of man- 
hood, and through all the adventures of his prime, 
man desires fulness of life. It is always a right de- 
sire. If we go wrong in working it out, it is not 
that we have sought too much for life, but that we 
have sought it by inadequate means ; that we have 
gone up a blind alley, or that in hurrying to satisfy 
some small and clamorous bit of nature we have 
pushed aside something bigger and deeper. 

We wish to live and experience, at first, with 
no further reason, — the wish speaks from every 
instinct that is growing in us, and it needs no ex- 

112 



THE DESIRE FOR EXPERIENCE 113 

plaining. But as we grow it expands in clearer 
consciousness and begins to express itself in more 
detailed words. Powers and qualities in us are 
standing unused, and we begin to think of them 
and to wish to explore them. We desire expe- 
rience, we say to ourselves, in order to find out 
what is in us. That desire also is right, and the 
gradual finding out is very interesting. Only we 
never arrive at a final answer, because what is in 
us is not a fixed quantity. Life does not only test 
and polish what is already there ; it goes on mak- 
ing us. And it makes us not into closed vessels, 
but into channels and organs and instruments for 
the "Eternal Ideas" and for all the life and power 
in the universe. If by sheer egoism a man suc- 
ceeds in so closing his eyes and ears and twisting 
his soul that he is no longer a channel for any- 
thing, then we soon perceive and say that there 
is "nothing in him." He is a closed vessel and 
an empty one. 

If we are to find out what life can make of 
us, we must be willing to grow and be made. To 
be obstinate or hasty or headstrong interferes with 
growth, and perhaps with many of us a self-con- 
scious timidity interferes still more. A valuable 
hymn speaks of the Christian as "content to fill 
a little space, if Thou be glorified." But it is 
often hard to find people who are content to have 



114 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

that littleness shown up. We are willing to be 
small in the background, but to be small in the 
foreground is too much for us, even if nothing can 
be done until the foreground is occupied some- 
how. If we are to live, we must stand where we 
are wanted and hope that we may grow to fill 
the place not too badly. 

II 

From time to time we shall find pain in this 
growing, and in this submission to the spirit that 
girds us and carried us whither we would not. 
But pain is not to be avoided by any refusal to 
grow. And in the abstract, at the centre of our 
will, we are not generally cowards in youth. When 
we think of the general question, we do not wish 
to shirk the pain that must come in the course 
of experience. It is the particular trial in the 
concrete that makes us so oddly surprised and in- 
credulous and resentful; and when this comes, I 
believe one can often find help by generalising it. 
"I am disappointed . . . Do I wish to be the only 
person in the world who is never disappointed?" 
"I am tormented by this weakness of my own. 
. . . Do I claim that, unlike all the rest of hu- 
manity, I should be dispensed from all weakness?" 
"Do I wish the great work and warfare of the 
universe to adjust itself so delicately to me that 



THE DESIRE FOR EXPERIENCE 115 

no battle, inward or outward, shall ever involve 
pain of mine?" We do not abolish the pain by 
such reasoning, but I believe that many characters 
can diminish by its means the surprised and selfish 
resentment which makes so great an addition to 
the pain. "This is an ordinary part of common 
life, of the main current of life. Do I ask that 
only the selected pleasant parts should come my 
way?" 

Or we may look on it in the light of our desire 
to learn from experience and to be made into 
something better than we are. "Do I really wish 
that nothing should ever go wrong; that I should 
always succeed in my undertakings; always be 
pleased with myself and have every one pleased 
with me? How smug and ignorant and self-satis- 
fied and useless I should become." I have found 
this thought so valuable for my own use that I 
was all fhe more shocked by a horrid distortion 
of it that I met the other day. A woman wrote, 
"When I hear people rejoicing over the fact that 
their lives are going smoothly and happily, and 
that they are having altogether a delightful time, 
I often wonder if it is really a thing to be so very 
joyful over. We don't progress much in such 
a life, do we? . . . I am afraid I am no believer 
in the theory that a long-continued easy time is 
altogether a thing to congratulate oneself over." 



116 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

Surely the people who rejoice that they are having 
altogether a delightful time are the rare and de- 
lightful people who do not "sit down upon their 
handful of thorns." Let us enjoy the good things 
when we have t'hem, and then let us try not to 
grumble too much when we lose them. 

We ask for life, and we hope to be able to take 
life as it comes. "To this God you ought to swear 
an oath, as the soldiers do to Cassar. . . . What 
shall you swear? Never to be disobedient, never 
to make any charges, . . . and never unwillingly 
to do or to suffer anything that is necessary." 



Ill 

Let us consider further the idea of learning 
from experience and being made by life as we 
go on. 

As in our childhood so all through our lives, 
if we shut our minds against learning we shall 
not learn. If we shut our hearts against some 
destiny, and go through it resenting and resisting 
and dragging back, then the great waves of ex- 
perience may drive over us and toss us up and 
down, and leave us closed and empty and inex- 
perienced to the end. To learn from life, the 
first condition is an inward acceptance of life. It 
is hard to find other words, and all words may 



THE DESIRE FOR EXPERIENCE 117 

be misinterpreted, yet surely we do all know the 
difference between inward resisting and inward 
accepting. Let me quote an appeal by a four- 
teenth-century preacher to that knowledge in his 
audience, in relation to one of the hardest kinds 
of experience. 

"There is an exceeding bitter myrrh which God 
gives, namely, inward assaults and inward dark- 
ness. When a man is willing to taste this myrrh, 
and does not put it from him, it wears down flesh 
and blood, yea, the whole nature ; for these inward 
exercises make the cheek grow pale far sooner 
than great outward hardships, for God appoints 
unto his servants cruel fightings and strange dread, 
and unheard of distresses, which none can under- 
stand but he who has felt them. And these men 
are beset with such a variety of difficulties, so 
many cups of bitterness are presented to them, 
that they hardly know which way to turn, or what 
they ought to do; but God knows right well what 
he is about. But when the cup is put away, and 
these feelings are stifled or unheeded, a greater 
injury is done to the soul than can ever be 
amended. For no heart can conceive in what sur- 
passing love God giveth us this myrrh. . . . We 
come and complain, 'Alas, Lord, I am so dry, and 
it is so dark within me.' I tell thee, dear child, 
open thy heart to the pain, and it will do thee 



118 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

more good than if thou wert full of feeling and 
devoutness."* 

"Open thy heart." It need not mean going on 
always with feelings which perhaps ought to end, 
or sitting down before circumstances which per- 
haps we ought to alter. But it means taking our 
life as material to be accepted and dealt with, 
as a companion to be received and perhaps helped, 
not as an enemy to be fought and hated. It means, 
in short, just that difference which all of us know 
in practice from the inside, between the heart open 
and the heart closed. Often we deny the name 
of life to the apparent enemy. Of the trivialities, 
of the dusty road, of the cloud of disappointment, 
we say, "This is not life, and we want to live." 
We say of the kingdom of life, "Lo here," and 
"Lo there," and it ought to be within us all the 
time. Only if we open our hearts to life can its 
heart be opened to us. 

IV 

Within this acceptance lie discernment and se- 
lection and differences of use. A ray of light falls 
on an emerald. Some of the rainbow light in the 
ray is absorbed into the stone and stopped there ; 
some is passed through it; and the green light, 
isolated and pure and lovely, is singled out and 

Tauter, Sermon for Epiphany. 



THE DESIRE FOR EXPERIENCE 119 

given back to the eye. Even a stone thus selects 
from its environment, responding to one part in 
one way, to another part in another way. A plant 
distinguishes much more variously and richly; an 
animal much more still; a man most of all. Even 
on the lower edge of our consciousness, even 
within ourselves, we select. Some modern psy- 
chologists lay much stress on the half-conscious 
processes which allow one thought or impulse to 
pass into our mind, which make another change 
its form before it can gain full admittance, and 
which repress and shut out a third. Dangers lie 
in this repression — in treating part of life as an 
enemy. We are safer when we manage to ac- 
cept it, perhaps in a changed form. 

One kind of discernment is used socially when 
we say in practice, "Let this part of experience 
be passed on to the world, and let this other part 
end with me." We act as conductors for some 
vibrations and non-conductors for others; we 
are sometimes the pedal that prolongs reson- 
ance and sometimes the other pedal that stops 
it. Sometimes, indeed, one meets with people — 
perhaps in a class or an audience — who seem to 
be non-conductors and anti-resonators for every- 
thing we can think of; but really everybody passes 
on something, good things or bad. We know 
the proverbial story of the man who receives an 



120 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

annoying letter at breakfast, and so is cross to his 
wife, who presently goes shopping and is rude 
to the shopman, who relieves himself by scolding 
an assistant, who scolds the errand-boy, who quar- 
rels with his sister, and so on perhaps for ever, 
unless the series can end in a blessed non-conduct- 
ing mind that will bury in its bosom the rebukes 
of many people. 

V 

This power of wise discernment and manage- 
ment of pedals ought to grow with length of ex- 
perience. What else ought to grow? On the 
whole I think that, when we improve as we grow 
older, it is chiefly in the region of wisdom and 
skill. The flame of high desire, the mountain 
visions of life, may be present as fully and richly 
in early youth as in any of our years, and youth 
indeed fears often that these may die out as years 
go on. Wordsworth's lines are too well known 
to quote, and I will quote instead from Alice Mey- 
nell's "Letter from a Girl to her own Old Age." 

"0 fainting traveller, morn is grey in heaven. 
Dost thou remember how the clouds were driven? 
And are they calm about the fall of even? 

Suffer, silent one, that I remind thee 

Of the great hills that stormed the sky behind thee, 

Of the wild winds of power that have resigned thee. 



THE DESIRE FOR EXPERIENCE 121 

Listen — the mountain winds with rain were fretting, 
And sudden gleams the mountain-tops besetting, 
I cannot let thee fade to death, forgetting. 

What part of this wild heart of mine I know not 
Will follow with thee where the great winds blow not, 
And where the young flowers of the mountain grow not. 

Yet let my letter with thy lost thoughts in it 
Tell what the way was when thou didst begin it. 

I am sure the misgivings need not be justified. 
If we care for mountains and are willing to climb 
them, the paths of middle age will be as splendid 
as those of youth, only not more splendid, because 
that early glory can hardly be overpassed. Pas- 
sion and generosity, courage, aspiration, may come 
into life full-grown. What should grow as we 
grow older is the width and richness of the world 
on which these are to work, and our skill and 
steadiness in bringing the two together, bridging 
the gulf between the central glory and the concrete 
details of life. 

Our aspirations can be no higher than they 
were in youth, but we may grow in the wisdom 
which translates them and the perseverance which 
carries them out. Our intuition and inspiration 
may be born full-grown, but not the reasoning 
judgment with which we supplement them and pre- 
pare their way. The passion of love for a person 
or a cause was perfect in youth, but the loyalty 
with which we can work for it may grow as long 



122 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

as we live. Love had his path ready made 
through impulse and emotion, and we lose much 
indeed if ever we let that early path become over- 
grown. But it is a path along the hillside, narrow 
though lovely, and it is easily blocked by a fall 
of stones or the overflow of a stream. Love 
would be cut off far too often and far too long 
from his issue into our life, if we had not made 
him another road by the levels of reason and faith- 
fulness and steady understanding; a road which 
we can make smoother and wider every year. 
Faithfulness is part of the making of this road, 
and patience and tolerance and charity are other 
parts. It was often the avalanche of impatience 
that blocked the hillside way. We had sensitive 
and fiery fanaticisms; we saw unpardonable sins: 
"they ought to refrain from this at least, it is so 
easy to refrain." Every one of us has classified 
mankind, using our little footrule which seemed 
so obviously right, damning the sins we had no 
mind to. Experience ought to bring us slowly to 
believe something of the almost incredible pro- 
nouncement, "Other sheep I have, which are not 
of this fold." 

VI 

That is, it ought to bring us there if we will 
be brought. These mediating virtues can increase 
every year, but we know well how terribly also 



THE DESIRE FOR EXPERIENCE 123 

they may shrink. As we grow older we may grow 
not wider but narrower, not steadier but more 
fussy and fretful and fickle, not more loyal but 
more fault-finding and more apathetic. We have 
not the least right to assume that we are better 
than ten years ago because we are different. The 
divine powers in our heart, we hope, never wholly 
die so long as we live, but their old path into 
life may be overgrown and the new road may 
never have been made, so that our heart is cut 
off from our living. And the more years we live 
without our heart in it, the more ignorant we be- 
come and the smaller and the more helpless. 

But this is not a dreadful chance — a disease that 
may come on us against our will. There is no 
need to be afraid of the years ahead. "Oh that 
I knew if I should persevere," said the saint in 
the story, and the voice answered, "If thou didst 
know it, what wouldst thou do? Do that, and 
thou shalt be safe." To learn from life, all we 
need is the will to learn. "One small part of me 
wills to learn, but the rest is indifferent or frivolous 
or self-satisfied." Then let that small part of 
me take hold of however small a part of life, of 
an idea or value however incomplete. 

"I give you the end of a golden string, 
Only wind it into a ball — 
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate 
Built in Jerusalem's wall." 



124 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

We need not be troubled by our own indifference. 
We may fear that we shall play with life, but the 
God of life will not play with us. We need not 
be troubled by our self-satisfaction. Why fret 
over what will fall into dust at the touch of his 
finger? 

God without and God within, and I the meet- 
ing-place. To ask to be exempted from the com- 
mon lot of battle and trouble and joy would be 
asking to be exempted from himself. To be will- 
ing to grow and be made is to will that he should 
grow and take shape in me. To find out what 
is in me is to find out what is in him. "Prove me, 
test me, question me," we are saying when we ask 
for life, but it is he in us that must answer his 
own questions. Life is God's proving of me, but 
that means nothing else than my proving of God. 



THE DESIRE FOR EXPERIENCE 125 



THE CLIMBERS 



Great was the mountain, 

And God on the height of it. 
I must go venturing, 

Affront all the might of it. 
Up where the clouds blow, 

By great ivoods swelling; 
Over rocks and over snow 

To His white dvjelling. 



Morning shone royally, 

No one need to tarry. 
One slave along with me 

With burdens to carry. 
Into the forest way 

Steep and green-lighted, 
Till the wood's dark array 

Held me benighted. 



Days and nights held me there, 

Dim days unreckoned. 
Leaves prisoned all the air, 

Undergrowth thickened. 
Strange creepers wove a screen 

For my undoing; 
But my slave's axe was keen: 

He taught me hewing. 



126 SUNDAY TALKS TO TEACHERS 

Out from the wood at last 

Half-blind I stumbled. 
Flood-like the whirlwind passed, 

Dull thunder rumbled. 
Then the slave pointed high — 

Clear through the thunder 
God's throne against the sky, 

Whiteness and wonder. 



Weary was the fell's length, 

Stonier and colder. 
I must use my servant's strength 

Over crag and boulder. 
Weak I grew, slipping back 

As we crept higher. 
He found the sheltered crack 

For the night's fire. 



Then from the hill of hope 

Chasms divided me; 
Down the rough sliding slope 

My comrade guided me. 
Scarce could I stand or cling, 

Trembling and thwarted; 
Only in his arm's ring 

Leant I supported. 



I had not reached the snow 

When I sank dying. 
Loud storm and daylight low, 

No use in crying. 
But my slave smiling stays 

Where I had thrown me. 
"Child," he said, "these many days 

Have you not known Me?" 



